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Mr. GREELEY'S LETTERS 



TEXAS AIsTD THE LOAVER MISSISSIPPI 



TO WHICH ARE ADDED HIS 



^ddma to %.\ (farmers of toaa, 



SPEECH ON HIS RETURN TO NEW YORK, 



JXJN'E 13, 1871. 



NEW YORK: 

TRIBUNE OFFICE, 

1871. 



^7i 



THE LESSON OP OUR CIVIL WAR. 



T7ie NeiD Orleans Price Current — a journal of the intensest Southern pro- 
clivities — discusses the visit of Mr. Greeley to the South as follows : 

" The industrial doctrines professed by Mr. Greeley have subjugated the 
South. Not because he j)rofessed them — they were planted before his day. 
They orig-iuated with the gT.-eat De Witt Clinton, who persisted iu the execu- 
tion of a great work of iutemal improvement which connected the Atlantic 
with the Lakes. That canal conducted population into the Indian wilder- 
ness. It was the pioneer of those other ways which have povu-ed all Europe 
upon the North-Western territory won by the arms of the Southern colonies, 
and which have naturally brought the votes and arms of that poijulation to 
the aid of the cities and sections that bestowed these blessings upon them. 
Mr. Webster, Mr. Carey, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Greeley have been the advo- 
cates of the cai^ital, commercial, and mechanical interests. It followed that 
when the question of inherent rights ui the States was referred to the arbi- 
trament of the sword ; the one section was on hand \vith soldiers, ships, arms, 
food, money, and credit, while the other had courage and a just cause, patri- 
otism and endurance. Now we are far from agreeing with the school ia 
which Mr. Greeley is an emiuent jirofessor, that any industrj' is entitled to 
special protection at the hands of the Government ; but we are satisfied that 
no people can ever hope to be free that exchange staple productions, worth 
gold and sUver, for commodities which perish in the use ; nor who have to 
send abroad for the guns that they fight with, the food that they eat, and 
the very clothing that they wear. There can be no doubt but that the com- 
mand of immigrant numbers, capital, and mechanical skill, with the financial 
resources of the Government and country, was due to the school of material 
and industrial develoioment at the North. They received powerful aid fi'om 
the total want of preparation in these departments at the South. We have 
always thought that Ames & Co., the greatest manufacturers of spades, 
shovels, and axes in the world, did more to conquer a people who had not a 
manufactory of si^ades, axes, or shovels, than any general of the Federal 
army. 

" Setting aside, then, the ruinous application which has been made of 
industrial progi'css by the Federalists, we have no cause of complaint against 
the disciples of this school. On the contrary, it is the true duty of the South 
to cultivate all those industries, the want of which has enslaved her. The 
foundation of war and conquest was laid when Washington in vain adjured 
the Southera i^eople to connect the waters of the Chesapeake with the 
North-Westem territoiy. Mr. Greeley happens to have been a cotemporary 
of the success of the system founded by Clinton, Adams, and Webster. If 
there be something in that system to refomi or oppose, let us do so ; but do 
not let us commit the mistake of turning our condemnation upon individuals 
who profess the doctrine. 

' ' There is one topic upon which Mr. iTr^eley is entitled to the unreserved 
approval of all who live by land and labor. He has been one of the most 
intelligent and consistent advocates of agricultural improvement. What he 
' Knows about Farming ' has become a jocular phrase ; but, if he knows as 
much as he has printed, he possesses no despicable amount of knowledge. It 
is a little late in the day to sneer at book-farming, when the best minds of 
the world are engaged in analyzing soil and seed to lessen the labors or in- 
crease the profits of the farmer. The Agricultural Department of The New 
York Tribune contains as much of scientific and practic:d knowledge as any 
other paper, and, as it has a larger circulation than most, must diffuse much 
of that knowledge." 



25 F '08 C^ 



THROUGH THE SOUTH. 



CULTIVATION BY STEAM IN LOUISIANA. 
[editorial correspondence op the tribune.] 

New Orleans, May 17. — Ou oui- way down tbrougli Mississippi, 
we made the acquaintance of Mr. H, E. Lawrence, a lifelong and 
successful sugar-planter, who, on learning my anxiety to witness 
Plowing by Steam (not for show, but as a business), invited us to 
visit the plantation of his brother, where that style of breaking up 
the earth is in fashion. Accordingly, a tug-boat was chartered, 
and some forty or fifty gentlemen, including the Congi'essman of the 
lower district, Gen. J. H. Sypher, Collector Casey, Judge Dibble, 
several Editors, and my traveling companions, Gen. E. A. Merritt, 
and Charles Storrs, Esq., devoted yesterday to Sugai'-planting by 
Steam. 

Magnolia plantation lies some fifty miles below this city, having 
a front of two miles on the west bank of the river, with the Gulf of 
Mexico but five miles distant on either hand. Most of the ten-mile 
strip which here constitutes the County (late parish) of Plaquemine 
is a reedy marsh, the haUnt of alligators, musketoes, &c., which a 
tempest in the Gulf may submerge at any time ; but a fine forest of 
Live Oak on the rear of this plantation indicates that the surface 
usually dry is wider at this point tlian the average. The famous 
Levees are slight afiairs so near the Gulf, where the rise and fall of 
the mighty stream (here a mile and a half wide) rarely exceeds three 
feet, and at the utmost is seven. The i-iver-surface is now but two 
to three feet below that of the Levees, and has recently been two 
feet higher. Water leaking through the Levee is caught in the 
substantial ditches that everywhere traverse the plantations, and 
runs swiftly away till lost under the rank vegetation of the swamps 
or absorbed by some bayou of the adjacent Gulf. This whole legion 
has of course been formed of the muddy sediment deposited by the 
Father of "Waters wherever the swiftness of its current is arrested. 
Thus by ten thousand annual overflows, mainly in April or May, 



4 LETTER FROM NEW ORLEANS. 

Loiaisiana has been projected far into the Gulf; and the process of 
making new land at the expense of salt water is still in progress. 
Though the tide rises eighteen inches at New Orleans, and is felt 
at Donaldsonville, seventy miles further up, the force of the current 
keeps the river here wholly fresh at this season, though it is some- 
what brackish at times when less water is passing out. That the 
soil is rich, black, and of unfathomable depth, need not be added. 
Ditching or deep plowing is constantly unearthing immense cypresses 
which have been imbedded here for thousands of years — some of 
them still sound and serviceable. 

Mr. Effingham Lawrence, the owner of Magnolia plantation, is a 
scion of a well-known Long Island family, the son of a good farmer, 
and. himself invented a plow when but ten years old. Cultivation 
is not only his pursuit but his passion. He came hither while still 
yoimg, and has planted since his minority. The machinery in his 
Sugar-House, where he refines more sugar than he makes, has cost 
$300,000, and little of it has been superseded by later and more 
perfect devices. Of his 3,000 acres, he cultivates 1,000, which is 
nearly all that stands well out of water. Some of the most efficient 
of his former slaves have left him to plant rice on small places below 
him, where they make |1,000 to $2,000 each per annum, being 
superior workers. Most of his ex-slaves chose to remain with him, 
and some of them are here earning $40 per month. His arable acres are 
divided into tracts or fields of five to ten acres each by deep ditches 
on the north and south, crossed by firm high roads on the east and 
west. These acres have been sixty or seventy years cultivated, 
mainly in Cane, and have received little or no fertilization, unless 
an annual burning the waste stalks or " trash " of the Cane to get 
rid of it may be called such. Negroes and mules have till recently 
furnished all but the brain-power employed. 

Mr. Lawrence was accustomed to use teams of eight mules to each 
plow, and was then able to pulverize but eight to ten inches in 
depth. Had he not been an experienced and capable plowman, con- 
stantly in the field and often between the plow-handles, he could not 
have got below six inches, even by the aid of all the persuasives 
known to plantation management. Of course his soil, anniially 
drawn upon by such exhausting crops as Cane and Corn, grew gradu- 
ally less productive ; and he was among the earliest to realize the ne- 
cessity of bringing Steam to the aid of Agriculture, He had means 
and credit ; he thoroughly understood his business and its needs ; he 



CULTIVATION BY STEAM. 5 

visited Europe and scrutinized the working of various Steam Plows ; 
and he concluded that Fowler's machinery, whereof two powerful 
engines stand at each side of the field and draw the plows back and 
forth by winding up and unwinding wire-ropes around their respec- 
tive drums, was the only device adapted to this soft, heavy, easily 
compacted soil. He bought sviccessively two sets of these machines, 
the second much heavier and more powerful than the first ; and he 
is now using thirty-horse engines, supplied on his resolute demand, 
though none so powerful had ever been constructed for plowing till 
he ordered them. When the Fowlers have done their best for him, 
he takes the machines into his own shops and directs such modifica- 
tions as his own experience has suggested. He is confident that we 
shall soon require sixty-horse engines, and that by their aid dry 
prairie may be plowed two feet deep at the rate of at least fifty 
acres per day. 

Though the season has been persistently cool and rainy, so that 
everything is backward, and the soil was too wet to be plowed to 
advantage, yet we found, on our unannounced arrival, both sets of 
plowing machinery in full operation, with none but negro field-hands 
near them, though an overseer I'ode from field to field supervising 
their efibrts. Boys of 12 to 14 years, who could not hold a breaking- 
up mule- plow, were running engines as learners, at wages of seventy- 
five cents each jjer day. The ground was cane-stubble, heavily ridged 
or hilled to counteract excess of moisture, with the " trash " of last 
year's crop lying between the rows and constantly clogging and chok- 
ing the plows, often requiring the machinery to be stopped in order 
to clear them. The subsoil — never disturbed till now — is a glu- 
tinous clay loam, compacted by sixty years' treading of heavy mule 
teams, so wet that it came up unbroken, as if it were glue, and 
about as easy to pulverize as so much sole-leather. So obstinate is 
it that Mr. Lawrence had reduced each gang of plows to two, lest 
his engines shovild be stalled or his wire-ropes broken. These two 
each cut a furrow sixteen inches wide and fully two feet in aver- 
age depth : had the surface been level, they would have averaged 
twenty-six inches. They were drawn across the field (576 feet) 
faster than most men would like to walk. Three men were reqiiired 
to keep them in place, and clear them of the choking " trash," which 
jT would have burned out of their way, though I, had I been planter, 
would have preferred to hare it buried as they buried it. Against 
all these impediments, each set of machinery was plowing from five 



6 LETTER FROM NEW ORLEANS. 

to six acres per day — plowing them two feet deep, remember, and 
thus relieving them of the generally superabundant moisture as shal- 
low plowing, or even ordinary sub-soiling, never did and never can. 
Mr. Lawrence, upon land thus plowed, makes an average of 2,000 
pounds per acre of sugar where he formerly made but 800 pounds. 
And he regards himself as yet on the threshold of Steam Cultiva- 
tion. 

And even this was not the best he had to show us. In other 
fields, perhaps half a mile distant, other machines were cultivating 
Cane hy Steam. I believe the like of this has not yet been done 
elsewhere on earth. The rows of Cane are fully seven feet apart ; 
the plants now fully a foot in average height. A locomotive engine 
stands at either end of the field, moving forward or backward at a 
touch of the hand of the negro boy standing upon it and looking 
out for signals. The cultivator is composed of five or six ordinary 
horse cultivators, enlarged and fixed in a frame, whereof the half 
that has just stirred the earth to a depth of two and a width of five 
feet is lifted clear of the ground on reaching the engine which draws 
it, while its counterpart is brought down to its work by the plow- 
guider stepping upon it. At a signal, the boy at the other end of 
the field or " land " starts his engine, and begins to wind up his wire- 
rope and uncoil or pay out that of the drum beneath the opposite 
engine, pulling the cultivators through the earth as they are guided 
nearer the row that they were kept further from as they passed in 
the opposite direction. Having thus thoroughly pulverized the 
space between two rows, by traversing it twice, the engines move for- 
ward to the next space and there repeat the operation ; and so on till 
nightfall. Mr. Lawrence assured me that one such thorough work- 
ing answers for the season ; whereas, while tilled by mule-j^ower, 
every cane-field required working six times per season at intervals 
of fifteen days. A set of machinery and hands tills about twelve 
acres per day. I judge the cost of this day's work, including fuel 
and wear of machinery, ranges from $25 to $30. This is far below 
the cost of repeated workings by mule-powei', while it is much more 
efiicacious. The land plowed and tilled by steam is far dryer than 
the rest. Mr. Lawrence considers his thousand acres under tillage 
worth 1100 per acre more than they would be but for Steam Cul- 
ture. He will keep his two sets of Plowing machinery at work not 
only throughout each day when the earth is not too sodden, but (by 
relays of hands) throughout each night also, when the moon serves. 



LOUISIANA AND HER LEVEES. 7 

Steam tillage of growing crops, being a nicer, more critical opera- 
tion, will be confined to daylight. But the Autumn is here the dry 
season, therefore most favorable to plowing ; and he realizes an 
immense advantage in this : Throughout the cane-cutting months 
of October and November, when all the mules on a plantation are 
overworked at hauling up cut Cane from the fields to the sugar- 
house, so that plowing with animals is impossible, he will have his 
plowing machinery constantly at work, doing him most excellent 
service in preparing for next year's crop, 

I am quite aware that this letter will not convey any clear idea 
either of the machinery or the processes employed in Steam Plowing 
and Tillage. No sensible man expects to be made acquainted with 
these otherwise than by personal and careful observation. If I have 
given any tolerable idea of the results achieved, their cost and their 
value, I have done all I purposed. I close, then, with an avowal of 
my confident belief that Mr. Eflfingham Lawrence has rendered an 
immense service to American Agriculture, especially that of the 
Prairie States, by demonstrating the benefits not merely of Steam 
Plowing but of subsequent Steam Tillage, and that the day is not 
remote wherein the " barrens " of Long Island and New Jersey, the 
rich intervales of the Connecticut and the Susquehanna, will be 
profitably plowed and tilled to a depth of twenty-four to thirty 
inches by Steam Power, and that far larger and surer crops than those 
of the past will therefrom be realized. H. G. 



THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI AND THE GULF. 

[editorial correspondence of the tribune.] 

Houston, Texas, May 20. — I presume there is no richer soil 
on earth than that formed by the annual overflow of its banks by 
the mighty Mississippi. That inundation has been checked, not 
precluded, by the artificial Levees, which, though locally advan- 
tageous, seem to me, on a broader view, mistaken. The current 
of the Father of Waters is, in the main, so resistless when the 
river is at a high stage, and is so surcharged with the richest eai-th, 
that it has only to be modified, not arrested, to induce it to com- 
mence a deposit of fertilizing sediment. Now, if its banks were so 
adjusted that it would at once overflow them along its whole course, 
from Cairo to the Balize, it could never rise six inches above them, 



5 SOIL AND PKODUCTS OF LOUISIANA. 

and its inundations, no longer devastating, would still further enrich, 
and gradually though slowly elevate the adjacent region. I dis- 
trust the permanent efficacy of any artificial Levees. It is not prac- 
ticable to pile both banks of a great river for a full thousand miles ; 
yet, without piling, nothing will surely pi-event the undermining 
of the highest and firmest Levees, so that they will crumble into the 
current and be swept away, causing crevasses which human power 
is inadequate to close till the river falls. I predict, therefore, that 
leveeing will fail to keep the Mississippi within its banks; and, 
while I do not suggest any alternative, I submit that it were better 
to bear existing evils than to seek their cure through agencies likely 
to create evils still greater. 

I judge from what I have seen that the surface of most of the 
acres of Louisiana accounted land, is lower than that of the adja- 
cent rivers and bayous. Natui'ally, swamps and marshes abound, 
mainly covered by thick forests of Live Oak, Cypress, and some 
smaller trees, usually standing in six to twelve inches of water, and 
intersected by small bayous, averaging four to six feet in depth of 
water, the congenial home of the alligator, as they would be of* the 
frog and the duck, if the alligator were not fond of a meat diet. 
The gray moss which trails from most of the trees in these swamp- 
forests is much admired by the inhabitants, and is gathered to fill 
mattresses. Very little has yet been done toward draining these 
vast morasses, because of their very slight inclination toward the 
Gulf, in which direction alone can water be made to flow away 
from them. Ultimately, they will be severally leveed or dyked, and 
then pumped diy by steam ; but not these many years. Mean- 
time, the relatively dry land which separates them, being two or 
three feet higher, has been largely improved and cultivated, thotigh 
some of it has been neglected since the War. Cane and Cotton are 
grown on a part of the plantations ; Corn quite generally ; Potatoes 
and what we call sweet potatoes, with corn and some cotton, by the 
Blacks on their petty holdings. I had been told that the Black 
women no longer work in the fields ; but they loere at work on most 
of the patches we passed between New Orleans and Brashear, eighty 
miles westward on the Atchafalaya, where we took boat for Gal- 
veston. In many places, husband, wife, and one or two children, 
were hoeing side by side ; and, though this kind of agriculture is 
not very efficient, their crops generally looked well. Where their 
patches are easily flowed, part of each was often devoted to Rice, 



ADDRESS TO THE FAKMERS OF TEXAS. 9 

whereof the culture in this State is rapidly extending. I under- 
stand that it is considered the siirest and most profitable grain-crop 
grown in Louisiana, while it requires no costly machinery to fit it 
for sale. The grower takes it in its rough state to the mill, where 
he receives 100 povxnds of the cleaned or hulled grain for each IGO 
pounds in the hull, called " paddy." A poor man can do better 
at growing Rice than Cotton. 

I doubt that one-eighth of the area of Louisiana is to-day under 
tillage, while she grows little or no other than wild grasses of 
slight value. She has some millions of acres of thin, poor, sandy 
soil in her northern and eastern sections, usually covered with Pine, 
some of it of good size and quality, the rest small and worthless. 
Leaving this to grow timber, the residue is exceedingly fertile ; yet 
less than half of it is arable without the aid of steam. By-and-by, 
bayous will be dredged, dykes or levees constructed, large inclosures 
pumped dry, then plowed and tilled by gigantic steam-engines; and 
then Louisiana' will rapidly take rank among the most productive 
and populous of the States composing our Union. 



SUGGESTIONS TO FARMERS. 



ADDRESS BY HORACE GREELEY, OP NEW YORK, AT THE STATE AGRICUL- 
TURAL FAIR. 

Houston, Texas, May 23, 1871. — The civilization of our race is 
evinced and measured by the gi-owth and progress of its Agriculture. 
The thorough savage is never a cultivator. What the earth spon- 
taneously produces, he appropriates without gratitude and consumes 
without forecast. He revels in abundance one week, to be pinched 
by hunger the next. Only his want of an ax or his ignorance of 
its use precludes his felling, and thus destroying, the tree which, 
for generations, has fed his tribe with its nourishing, palatable fruit. 
He delights in gorging himself on the flesh of animals, but never 
feeds nor shelters them. Thus devouring and devastating, never 
tilling nor producing, he requires square miles to subsist scantily, 
precariously, his tribe, where his civilized successor will feed and 
clothe more persons generously on so many acres. After poets and 
dreamers have done their best to glorify him with 

" The light that never was on sea or land," 



10 OEIGIN AKD GROWTH OF AGRICULTURE. 

the savage is a miserable creature, enjoying less and suffering more 
than the wolf or the leopard, to which a lawless, careless, predatory 
freedom is truly natural, and which is at home with the elements, 
as he never was nor can be. 

The savage builds no monuments — leaves but scanty proofs that 
he ever existed save his bones. A hundred of his generations 
come and go, leaving the earth and its living vesture essentially as 
they found it. But let civilized man replace him for a bare lifetime, 
and he leaves foot-prints that centuries will not efface. Our Atlan- 
tic seaboard has hardly been known to civilized men for four genera- 
tions ; yet, if these were to be swept away to-morrow, and the 
wilderness untrodden by human foot were here to resume its 
ancient sway, more memorials of these four generations would 
challenge attention and reward inquiry two thousand years hence 
than we can now discern of all the races that peopled this Atlantic 
;slope prior to the voyages and discoveries of Columbus. 

The rigors of Winter, and the experienced perils of starvation 
•during its reign, gradually impel the savage to save and store the 
■grains and fruits of the seasons of plenty to subsist him through 
the dearth which regularly follows : and he slowly learns to pre- 
serve and tame the animals best calculated to serve him by di-aft 
or as food. The grains which habitually grow and ripen on the 
fertile intervales Of streams which annually overflow their banks, 
ultimately teach him to increase their quantity and render their 
reproduction more certain by cultivation. To plant the seed in 
the most promising localities and take the chance of its repro- 
ducing its kind ten or twenty-fold, is his first essay ; necessity im- 
pels and experience gradually teaches more methodical and eflScient 
cultivation. The loss of cattle by cold, by storm, by hunger, at 
length suggests the curing of fodder for winter use, and the pro- 
vision of such shelter as the climate may seem to require. The 
suj^ply of food being thus doubled and trebled, population increases 
correspondingly ; and thus is created a necessity for a still more 
thorough and effective tillage of the soil. Thus pressed by want or 
a justified apprehension of it, Man slowly learns to deepen his cul- 
ture, to fertilize his .fields, to diversify his implements and improve 
his methods, until the labor of one produces adequate sustenance 
for many, and ever-enlarging conceptions, wants, capabilities, 
achievements, enjoyments, expand his intellect, refine his nature, 
and exalt his aspirations. His increased power over Nature is the 



WATER IN AGEICULTUEE. 11 

general measure of his progress from the lowest barbarism \ip to 
that perfect mental and moral stature which is symbolized by 
Copernicus, Galileo, Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton. 

Modern Agriculture is an art — or rather a circle of arts — based 
upon Natural Science, which is a methodical exposition of Divine 
Law. The savage is Nature's thrall, whom she scorches, freezes, 
starves, drowns, as her caprice may dictat*^. He lives in constant 
dread of her frosts, her tornadoes, her lightnings. Science teaches 
his civilized successor to turn her wildest eccentricities to his own 
use and profit. Her floods and gales saw his timber and gi^ind his 
grain ; in time, they will chop his trees, speed his plow, and till his 
crops as well. Science transforms and exalts him from the slave 
into the master of the elements. If he does not yet harness the 
electric fluid to his plow, his boat, his wagon, and make it the 
most docile and useful of his servants, it is because he is still but 
little advanced from barbarism. Essentially, the lightning gar- 
nered in a summer cloud should be as much at his command and 
as subservient to his needs as the water that refreshes his thirsty 
fields and starts his hitherto lifeless wheels. 

Nowhere has human stolidity been more forcibly demonstrated 
than in the average farmer's bygone dealings with water. This 
mobile, subtle fluid, which will voluntarily travel wherever you 
will, if you give it an inch of descent per mile, ought to have long 
since been absolutely and everywhere at the beck and call of every 
cultivator. And yet, I have stood beside a corn-field parched and 
withering from drouth, while a mill-stream danced and braAvled 
right through its center, falling twenty feet in a hundred rods, yet 
moistening the roots of no plants but those of the two rows next its 
bed on either side, while three days' work of two men would have 
dammed and diverted its waters so that four or five acres of the com 
would have been unrolled and set to growing again by their in- 
fluence. Whoever travels with open eyes may note a thousand 
such opportunities in almost any State — a hundred or more in 
nearly every County. 

With Grass, the facility and advantage of Irrigation are still more 
obvious. I visited last Summer the region of the White Mountains 
— Coos, the northernmost county of New-Hampshire, That dis- 
trict is cold, mountainous, rugged, rocky, with a strong, granitic 
soil, which does not lend itself easily to tillage, but which is very 
natural to grass. And, so numerous are the horses required for the use 



12 ADDRESS TO TEXAS FAKISIEES. 

of its many Summer visitors, that Hay is always worth $20 per 
ton, and, in Winters following dry Summers and Autumns like the 
last, considerably more. It is a country of abundant springs and 
rills, and dancing, laughing streams, which fall so rapidly as to 
make Irrigation an obvious and profitable resort. I am quite sure 
that ten thousand acres of grass land in that county might be am- 
ply irrigated, by dams and reservoirs and shallow ditches, at an aver- 
age cost of $20 per acre, and with an average increase in their annual 
product of one ton of good hay per acre, worth at least $10 as it 
stands in the field ready for the scythe of the mower. Here would 
be fifty per cent, annual return for the investment ; and its value 
is likely to increase rather than diminish. And yet, I doubt that 
there are one hundred acres of that covmty irrigated : and what 
wonder, since the farmers of the older and richer counties south of 
it, whose fields have been cultivated from one to two centuries, 
have not yet realized the thriftlessness and waste of letting rills 
and brooks dance idly by and through the crops that are perishing 
from thirst ? While the rich valleys of the Connecticut and Ken- 
nebec, which have for generations been tilled by fanners exception- 
ably Avealthy and intelligent, exhibit not an acre irrigated to every 
thousand left to depend for water on the caprice of the often scorch- 
ing, withering skies, what can we reasonably expect of newer, ruder, 
poorer communities ? 

If Irrigation were a novelty. Conservatism might shake its head 
gravely, doubtingly, thereat,without exposing its emptiness of brains. 
But in fact the artificial application of water to secure and increase 
production is older than the Plow — older than authentic History. 
Nattire gave the example and the broadest possible hint in the 
valley of the lower Nile ; Italy borrowed and improved upon the 
suggestion in the early morn of Christendom, if not earlier; and 
the Spaniards brought the art to this country before the Pilgrims 
built their huts around Plymovith Rock. How came it that lessons 
so striking and so palpable can have so long been defied by a people 
so alert and eager for profit as ours ? 

I believe the time is at hand when not only will streams be 
generally utilized to moisten adjacent fields, and thus largely increase 
■their product, but when eveiy thirsty, arid plain will have its bounte- 
ous well, with a wind-mill erected over it to pump its contents auto- 
matically, at little cost, into a reservoir where, after being warmed 
by the sun, and perhaps fertilized, they will be drawn away in 



INTELLECT IN AGRICITLTTTRE. 13 

gentle rills to irrigate acre after aci'e on every side. I believe that 
even Texas could richly afford to dig and equip a thousand such 
wells this summer, and many thousands in the course of the next 
dozen years. Every plain or intervale that slopes gently, imper- 
ceptibly, to the stream which divides or bounds it, should have its 
well at the highest coi-ner, with a spacious shallow reservoir by its 
side, and ditches leading thence to every point whence gravitation 
would carry the water gently over and through the soil of nearly 
or quite all its area. Even though that water should shrink until 
it utterly failed in seasons of severest drouth, the soil would still 
respond to the freshening influence of the moisture with which it 
had been charged and saturated during the fervid weeks and months 
required to dry up its deeper sources. Meantime, the crop woiild 
be perfected, and the drouth, when it did at last fasten on the iri-i- 
gated plain, would perforce exhaust itself on the sea.son of Nature's 
annual sterility and wintry repose. 

In the great i'uture which Science and Human Energy are pre- 
paring. Artesian wells, bored to depths of a thousand to fifteen 
hundred feet, will be sunk on every arid plain, and near the head 
of every capacious valley wherein water is deficient, to enable the 
strong currents that flow from subjacent mountain or elevated 
plateau between diverse strata to rivers and seas to rise by 
gravitation to the surface and fruitfully overspread hundreds of 
acres, instead of uselessly coursing in darkness beneath. These 
wells, being costly, will long be comparatively rare ; but the " Staked 
Plains" of Texas and New-Mexico, with the wide mis-named 
" Desert " at either foot of the Rocky Mountains, will yet be trans- 
formed into the verdurous, plenteous feeding-ground of innumer- 
able cattle and sheep by irrigation, whereto Artesian wells will 
largely contribute ; one of them subserving the end of many ordi- 
nary wells, while drawing water from sources beyond the reach of 
any or all of them. 

Agriculture, as it steadily rises from the low level of barbarism to 
the commanding altitude of a true civilization, becomes a more and 
more intellectual calling. The rude pioneer,wrestling stubbornly with 
the giant forest or the inhospitable marsh, may waste half his time 
in play or idleness ; but his work, when he does work, is purely mus- 
cular, making no draft on mental power or culture. His fields are 
subdued and tilled, his crops produced and secured, almost wholly 
by dint of the strength in his good right arm. But, for his civilized. 



14 ADDRESS TO THE FAKMEKS OF TEXAS. 

enlightened descendant and successor, all this is changed. Water, 
wind, steam, supply the needed power ; his task is to mold and guide 
that power to beneficent ends. In my boyhood, the man who cut 
an acre of heavy grass did therein a good day's work, which taxed 
his physical energies to the utmost and sent him weary and exhaust- 
ed to bed, to rise stiff and sore for the morrow's duties ; now, any 
intelligent, resokite girl of fifteen, guiding a span of horses, may cut 
five aci'es of just such grass before noon, cut it better than the best 
mower ever did, and alight from her seat on the mowing-machine 
untired and eager for a pic-nic or frolic after dinner. Steam saws 
wood into fuel for the kitchen fire-place and the parlor stove ; cuts 
stalks and straw into half-inch pieces and then cooks them into a 
pulpy mass ; slices roots ; churns cream into butter without super- 
vision ; and is jvist harnessing itself to the plow, resolved to pulve- 
rize the soil more rapidly, more cheaply, to a gi-eater depth, to a 
more equal and perfect comminution, than it has ever been possible 
to attain by the force of animal power. Manifestly, we stand but 
on the threshold of the new age whereof Steam is at once the har- 
binger and the impulse : but enough has been developed to assure 
us that more and better is at hand. 

Nor should we doubt that Steam itself is the forerunner of agen- 
cies still more potent and more cheaply efficacious. Mighty as have 
been its achievements, they only serve to render more obvious and 
lamentable its limitations. Of the power actually generated by the 
vaporization of water, I cannot say how great is the share utilized 
by an ordinary steam-engine, but I believe the estimates of scientists 
all range below twenty per cent. Then the enormous weight of 
boiler, fuel, and water, that mvist be transported with every form of 
locomotive, absorbs nearly half the power not squandered by imper- 
fect devices for directing and applying it. Mighty as Steam assur- 
edly is, it is not only a blind giant, but lae are deplorably blind 
with regard to its economy and adaptation. 

And why should Steam, even in its best estate, be final ? In- 
telligence has already spurned its trammels ; Thought has far out- 
stripped it in the invention and operation of the Magnetic Tele- 
grai)h ; why should the wondrous power we have evoked in Elec- 
tricity be limited to the transmission of ideas ? Why may it not 
be employed to impel material substances as well ? True, we have 
not yet learned how to transmit the power unquestionably generat- 
ed by Electricity ; but our average ignorance and incapacity, result- 



ELECTEICITY — UNDER-DEAINING. 15 

ing in obstruction and defeat, are constantly overstepped and trans- 
figured by the men of genius and of prescience wliom God benig- 
nantly sends to lead us on from achievement to achievement, from 
triumph to triumph. To be conscious of a need or a deficiency, is to 
be far on the way whereby we shall at last overcome it. Steam, as 
a productive force, an industrial factor, is barely a century old ; 
Electricity was harnessed to a wire and made a post-boy hardly 
thirty years ago. I do not believe this all, nor even the best, that 
this all-pervading, irresistible power is destined to do for us. I 
believe that plants will yet be grown by its aid with a celerity never 
yet attained ; that heat will be profitably produced and difiused by 
its agency ; and that power will be generated from electric bat- 
teries, of old or new device, which will supplement, if not in time 
supersede, all other mechanical forces, liberating Man almost wholly 
from obstruction and defeat by material obstacles, and rendering 
Pi'oductive Industry a matter of application and oversight, rarely 
or never taxing human sinews to achieve a result which invokes 
the employment of material force. 

If I do not speak here of what, in my section, as in Europe, is 
the basis of all thorovigh culture — I refer to Under-draining — it is 
not becavise I deem it inapplicable to your State, but simply that 
the time when it can be expected to command general attention 
here has not yet arrived. You do not need to warm your soil, 
lengthen your season of verdure, or hasten the growth and matur- 
ing of your crops, as we do ; and there are but few square miles of 
your State on which a net- work of under-drains three feet in average 
depth and but three rods apart, would not cost more than it would 
be worth. And yet, I have no doubt that many gardens, nurseries, 
&c., in this State ought to be thus drained, and would be to profit, 
if only to relieve them of an excessive moisture in Spring and early 
Summer, remaining stagnant in and souring the soil. By-and-by, 
you will begin to undei'-drain grain-fields and meadows as we do ; 
but that topic can wait. The draining of bogs and marshes, by 
widening, deepening, and straightening, the channels wherein water 
now flows from them — often making new ones in part, if not wholly 
— proflTers more obvious and instant advantages. The lands waiting 
to be thus reclaimed are nearly always exceptionally fertile ; they 
rarely present other obstacles to cultivation than water ; while their 
proper drainage must contribute signally to the healthfulness of the 
surrounding country. No State which embosoms extensive swamps 



16 ADDEESS TO THE FAEMEES OF TEXAS. 

or bogs should hesitate to have them surveyed by competent engineers 
and the best means of drying them ascertained and reported. 
Knowledge will almost inevitably lead to practical, decisive action 
with regard to these nurseries of fever, these magazines of disease 
and death. 

Bear with a few suggestions xipon a standing topic of debate 
among Southern cultivators. 

I am not young, as you see ; yet I cannot remember a time when 
the South did not affirm and deplore an excessive addiction of her 
people to Cotton. That eminent scholar and statesman, Hugh S. 
Legare, alluded to it as a venerable grievance, thirty-odd years ago. 
Beforq as well as since, every one remonstrated with every one 
against the fatuity which impelled Southrons to plant so much 
Cotton ; exhorted all to retrench and reform ; and then slid away to 
plant a few more acres than ever before. For generations, it was 
reiterated as an axiom that Cotton culture depended on Slavery ; 
yet Slavery is dead, and we produced nearly One Million tons of 
Cotton in 1870 — more than in any former year, with the excep- 
tions of 1859 and 1860. Yet, in this year of grace 1871, we have 
the old cry from millions of throats — " Plant less (Jotton ! " — and 
I presume with the old result. The army-worm, the boll-worm, 
may diminish the Cotton-crop ; expostidation, I judge, will not. 
I know no more striking illustration of what St. Pavil terms " the 
foolishness of preaching" than this incessant yet fruitless clamor 
against growing so much Cotton. 

Do\ibtless, the remonstrants are i"ight, as remonstrants are apt 
to be. But, after two generations of incessant deprecation, the 
passion for cotton-planting seems as intense and pervading as ever. 
The owner of a thousand ai*able acres, after hearing all that is to be 
said against it, plants almost exclusively Cotton. The poorest negro, 
who owns or rents a dozen acres, puts in his field of Cotton, and 
takes his chance for bread. He has endured less preaching on the 
subject than his old master ; but, had he been lectured from infancy 
on the madness of cotton-planting, he would have planted all the 
same. 

And this for a most obvious reason. Cotton is Money, and 
Money is Power. Cotton is of such moderate bulk in proportion 
to its value that it bears transportation far better than Wheat, or 
Corn, or Fruit, or Vegetables. It endures tropic suns and arctic 
frosts without injury ; it neither molds, nor rots, nor rusts, nor 



nSTDUSTKY SHOULD BE DIVERSIFIED. 17 

putrefies. He who has Cotton to sell does not quake at the foot- 
steps of the tax-gatherer, and can generally look the sheriff square 
in the face. 

Admitting that the South has grown, and still grows, too much 
Cotton — (and I judge that three millions of bales grown in 1870 
would have netted her as large a sum as the four millions she 
actually did grow) — I see no way to counteract this tendency but 
by introducing new bi'anches of industry whereof the product will 
also command money. In vain do you exhort the average planter 
to grow more Corn and make more Pork : he is often in debt, and 
chooses to produce what will surely sell for the money he sorely 
needs. He is sure Cotton will do this ; he is not so sure as to Corn 
or Pork. But plant one hundred Cotton and as many Woolen Fac- 
tories on the soil of your State, making a steady cash market here 
for Wool and Meat, for Grain and Vegetables, as well as Cotton, and 
now your Agriculture will naturally and certainly divide its forces 
and diversify its products. Farmers will grow diverse crops, if they 
know that a sure cash market is at hand. A denser jiopulation, a 
greater vaiiety and range of employments, these are pressing wants 
of the entire Soiith. Every wheel set to turning on a Southern 
water-fall, every manufactory of Edge-Tools or Farm Implements, 
started in any of your cities or villages, is certain profitably to 
divert labor from your Cotton-fields, as naked preaching never will. 
There is hardly an acre of Southern land which would not be 
doubled in value if Southern farms were mainly cultivated with 
Southern-made implements. Southern backs clothed in Southern- 
woven fabrics, and Southern dwellings filled with Southern-made 
furniture and wares. And, now that Slavery has gone out, it 
is high time that the useful arts were steadily and rapidly com- 
ing in. 

Am I inculcating what would injure my own section ? Not at 
all. The more you do for yourselves, the more you will require 
from abroad. The State of Arkansas has more inhabitants than 
the City of Boston ; yet the latter, while the focus of an immense 
interchange and large consumption of domestic products, buys and 
consumes far more of the productions of foreign lands. Our pur- 
chases are limited, not by our needs, but by our means. A thousand 
times it has been predicted that we should destroy our Foreign 
Commerce by protecting Home Industry, and a thoiisand times this 

has been proved a fallacy by increased imports under high duties. 
9, 



18 ADDRESS TO THE FAKMEKS OF TEXAS. 

If Texas were expending four times as much as she is, per annum, 
in the purchase of home-made wares and fabrics, she would buy far 
moi"e from abroad than she now does. If she had a dozen ax-factories 
in full operation, she might import fewer axes than now, but her im- 
ports of Steel, Iron, and a hundred other articles, would be swelled 
beyond computation. 

I hold the natviralization of new and the extension of existing 
Manufactures among the most urgent wants of this State, as of 
nearly every young community. Hence, I hold — not that you 
ought to pay a high price for a poor article becaiise it is home-made 
— not that you shovild forego the gratification of a legitimate want 
because the ai'ticle it contemplates is not of Texas growth or fabri- 
cation — but that each of yovi should give an intelligent preference, 
other things being equal, to whatever is made on your own soil — 
should buy your harness, or saddle, or pail, or broom, or plow, or 
ax, of your neighbor's make, in preference to one brought from 
abroad ; should take and pay for some first-rate Texas journal 
before looking abroad for a better. Having thus done your duty 
by the community whereof you are a part, if you are able and will- 
ing to take a second journal, I might possibly aid you in finding a 
good one. 

Is Agriculture a repulsive pursuit ? That what has been called 
Farming has repelled many of the youth of our day, I perceive ; 
and I glory in the fact. An American boy, who has received a 
fair common-school education and has an active, inquiring mind, 
does not willingly consent merely to drive oxen and hold plow for- 
ever. He will do these with alacrity, if they come in his way ; he 
will not accept them as the be-all and the end-all of his career. He 
will not sit down in a rude, slovenly, naked home, devoid of flow- 
ers, and trees, and books, and periodicals, and intelligent, inspiring, 
refining conversation, and there plod through a life of drudgery as 
hopeless and cheerless as any mule's. He has needs, and hopes, 
and aspirations, which this life does not and ought not to satisfy. 
This might have served his progenitor in the Ninth Century ; but 
this is the Nineteenth, and the young American knows it. He 
needs to feel the intellectual life of the age flowing freely into and 
through him — needs to feel that, though the City and the Railroad 
are out of sight, the latter is daily bringing within his reach all 
that is noblest and best in the achievements and attractions of the 
former. He may not listen to Sumner or Thurman in the Senate ; 



THE PRESERVATIOlSr OF TREES. 19 

to Ward Beecher or Tyng in the piilpit ; but the press multiplies 
their best thoughts and most forcible expressions at the rate of ten 
to twenty thousand copies per hoxir ; and its issues are within the 
reach of every industiious family. Any American farmer, who 
has two hands and knows how to use them, may, at fifty years of 
age, have a better library than King Solomon ever dreamed of, 
though he declared that " of making of many books there is no 
end ;" any intelligent farmer's son may have a better knowledge of 
Nature and her laws when twenty years old than Aristotle or Pliny 
ever attained. The Steam Engine, the Electric Telegraph, and the 
Power Press, have brought knowledge nearer to the huml)lest cabin 
than it was, ten centuries since, to the stateliest mansion ; let the 
cabin be careful not to disparage or repel it. To arrest the rush of 
our youth to the cities, we have only to diffuse what is best of the 
cities throughout the country ; and this the latest triumphs of civili- 
zation enable us easily to do. A home irradiated by the best 
thoughts of the' sages and heroes of all time, even though these be 
compressed within a few rusty volumes, cheered by the frequent 
arrival of two or three choice periodicals, and surrounded by such 
floral evidences of taste and refinement as are within the reach of 
the poorest owner of the soil he tills, will not be spurned as a 
prison by any youth not thoroughly corrupted and depraved. 

But thousands of farmers are more intent on leaving money and 
lands to their children than on informing and enriching their 
minds. They starve their souls in order to pamper their bodies. 
They grudge their sons that which would make them truly wise, 
in order to provide them with what can at best but make them rich 
in corn and cattle, while poor in manly purpose and generous ideas. 

— It may seem presumptuous in me to speak to you of the pres- 
ervation and diffusion of Trees in a State so new as yours, and of 
whose alternations of hill and valley, forest and prairie, you know 
so much and I so little. But there are laws everywhere potent, 
needs everywhere felt, and errors very generally committed ; and 
of these last the most pervading is the reckless extermination of 
Trees. It is not peculiar to this continent ; for France and Spain, 
Italy and Portugal, have for the most part been denuded of forests, 
and sufier for it not only in the scarcity of Timber and Fuel, but in 
the severity and duration of their drouths, the fierceness and 
devastations of their gales, the violence and aggravation of their 
floods. All of them have timber on their rugged, sterile mo\in- 



20 ADDRESS TO THE FAKMERS OF TEXAS. 

taiiis, where it is scax'cely accessible, and where it is least available 
to their denser and more active coiniminities. But if one-tenth ol 
the surface of each arable square mile were now covered with state- 
ly and serviceable forest-trees, those countries would be better fitted 
to maintain a large population, and their inhabitants would be more 
thrifty, efiicient, and comfortable, than they are. My own section 
of this continent has destroyed trees too eagerly, recklessly, and 
planted them too tardily, too sparingly. My county, of Westches- 
ter (ISTew York), began to be inhabited by our race fully two hun- 
dred and fifty years ago ; it has been divided into farms from one 
to two centuries, and its people are not behind others in sagacity 
and intelligence; they have still much land covered with mainly 
young timber ; yet there are not less than five thousand acres in 
that county to-day exposing rocks thinly and partially covered with 
soil which ought never to have been stripped bare of trees. Cut 
off" the timber, if you will, though it is better to thin out than to 
sweep away a forest where the land is not needed for tillage, and 
have trees of all ages and sizes growing on each acre devoted to 
forest. If those five thousand acres were reclad in their primitive 
vesture, all the springs and strc^ams of the county would be more 
copious, more equable, more constant, than they are, and the soil of 
the subjacent fields and mea,dows would endure drouth and retain 
moisture as they never can while hill-side and rocky ridge are ex- 
posed to sweep of wind and glare of sun. 

In this new, bounteous, sunny land, where the need of fuel is so 
much less than with us, yoiT are exposed to the miscalculation made 
by my ancestors two to four generations back, when, seeing seven- 
eighths of New-England covered by stately, luxuriant trees, they 
said, " There will always be timber enough. Let us cut and slash, 
and clear all the land we can ; others will save wood enough though 
we destroy all we have ; " but their children have lived to deplore 
their error. Fifty-five years ago, great pines were cut from hills now 
included in the city of Burlington, Vermont, sawed into boards, 
and these rafted down Lake Champlain and the Sorel to the St. Law- 
rence, and so shipped to Europe, not paying fifty cents per day for 
the labor, calling the worth of the timber nothing. Barely thii*ty 
years later, when Vermont began to constrvict her railroads, she 
had to draw the bridge-timber from Canada, paying for it many times 
what her own disparaged pines brought when they were so recklessly 
swept iway. The world is full of experiences as instructive as this. 



MAXIMS FOE FARMERS. 21 

It is not too soon to begin to plant forests in the more naked and 
arid portions of Texas ; it is high time that you were regarding good 
timber as property, and saving it with scrupulons care and foresight. 
Extensive sections of your State will need it before they can grow 
it, aside from those localities which need it already; and your 
Society can do her no better service than to impress on all own- 
ers of the soil, whether in village or rural district, the duty and 
profit of an annual and persistent ])lanting of choice and serviceable 
Trees. 

But— not to trespass too far on your patience — let me close with 
a few maxims, applicable to cultivation in every clime and under all 
circumstances, whether among populations dense as that of China 
or sparse as that of British America. 

I. Only GOOD Farming pays. He who sows or plants without 
reasonable assurance of good crops annually, might better earn 
wages of some capable neighbor than work for so poor a paymaster 
as he is certain 'to prove himself. 

IT. The good farmer is proved such hy the steady ajjpreciation 
of' his crops. Any one may reap an ample harvest from a fertile 
virgin soil ; the good fai-mer alone grows good crops at first, and 
better and better ever afterward, 

III. Tt is far easier to mxaintain the, productive capacity of a 
farm than to restore it. To exhaust its fecundity, and then attempt 
its restoration by buying costly commercial fertilizers, is wasteful 
and irrational. 

IV. The good farmer selh mainly such j^^odticts as are least ex- 
haustive. Necessity may constrain him, for the first year or two, to 
sell Grain, or even Hay ; but he will soon send ofi" his surplus mainly 
in the form of Cotton, or Wool, or Meat, or Butter and Cheese, or 
something else that retiirns to the soil nearly all that is taken from 
it. A bank account daily drawn upon, while nothing is deposited 
to its credit, must soon respond " No funds :" so with a farm simi- 
larly treated. 

V. notation is at least negative Fertilization. It may not posi- 
tively enrich a farm ; it will at least retard and postpone its impov- 
erishment. He who grows Wheat after Wheat, Corn after Corn, 
for twenty years, will need to emigrate before that term is fulfilled. 
The same farm cannot support (nor endure) him longer than that. 
All our great Wheat-growing sections of fifty jears ago are Wheat- 
growing no longer ; while England grows larger crops thereof on 



22 ADDRESS TO THE FAEltlEKS OF TEXAS. 

the very fields that fed the armies of Saxon Harold and William 
the Conqueror. Rotation has preserved these, as the lack of it 
ruined those. 

VI. Wisdovi is never dear, provided the article he genuine. T 
have known tarmers who toiled constantly from daybreak to dark, 
yet died poor, because, through ignorance, they wrought of disad- 
vantage. If every farmer would devote two houi-s of each day to 
reading and reflection, there would be fewer failures in farming 
than there are. 

VII. 27ie best investment a farmer can make for his children is 
that "which surrounds their youth with the rational delights of a 
beauteous, attractive home. The dwelling may be small and rude, 
yet a few flowers will embellish, as choice fruit-trees will enrich and 
gladden it ; while grass and shade are within the reach of the hum- 
blest. Hardly any labor done on a farm is so profitable as that 
which makes the wife and children fond and proud of their home. 

VIII. A good, jyractical Education, including a good trade, is a 
better outfit for a yo^ith than a grand estate with the drawback of an 
empty mind. Many parents have slaved and pinched to leave their 
children rich, when half the sum thus lavished would have profited 
them far more had it been devoted to the cultivation of their 
minds, the enlargement of their capacity to think, observe, and 
work. The one structure that no neighboihood can aflbrd to do 
without is the school-house. 

IX. A small library of well-selected books in his home has saved 
many a youth from wandering into the baleful ways of the Prodi- 
gal Son. Where paternal strictnesci and severity would have bred 
nothing but dislike and a fixed resolve to abscond at the first oppor- 
tunity, good books and pleasant surroundings have weaned many a 
youth from his first wild impulse to go to sea or cross the continent, 
and made him a docile, contented, obedient, happy lingerer by the 
parental fire-side. In a family, however rich or poor, no other good 
is so cheap or so precioiis as thoughtful, watchful love. 

X. 3Iost men are born poor ^ but no man, who has average capaci- 
ties and tolerable luck, need remain so. And the farmer's calling, 
though profiering no sudden leaps, no ready short-cuts to opulence, 
is the surest of all ways from poverty and want to comfort and 
independence. Other men must climb ; the temperate, frugal, dili- 
gent, jirovident farmer may grow into competence and every exter- 
nal accessory to happiness. Each year of his devotion to his home- 



TOPOGKAPHY OF TEXAS. 23 

stead may find it more valuable, more attractive than the last, and 
leave it better still. 

Farmers of Texas ! I bring you mainly old and homely truths. 
No single suggestion of this Address can be new to all of you ; 
most of them, I presume, will be familiar to the majority. There are 
discoveries in Natural Science and improvements in Mechanics 
which conduce to the efficiency of Agriculture ; but the principles 
which underlie this first of arts are old as Agriculture itself. Greek 
and Roman sages made observations so acute and practical that the 
farmers of to-day may ponder them with profit, while modern liter- 
ature is padded with essays on farming not worth the paper they 
have spoiled. And yet, the generation whereof I am part has wit- 
nessed great strides in your vocation, while the generation prepar- 
ing to take our places will doubtless witness still greater. I bid 
you hold fast to the good, with minds receptive of and eager for the 
better, and rejoice in your knowledge that there is no nobler pursuit 
and no more inviting soil than those which you proudly call y6ur 
own. 



TEXAS... THE STATE MATERIALLY CONSIDERED. 

[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.] 

HousTON^, Texas, May 25. — " How do you like Texas ? " I have 
been many times asked during the week I have been in the State — 
asked even before I was at all qualified to give an answer of any 
value. Now that I have ti-aveled some hundreds of miles, mainly 
in the valleys of the Trinity and the Brassos, I can speak somewhat 
more to my own satisfaction. Still, it should be considered that I 
have as yet seen only the south-eastern quarter of Texas, and but 
a small proportion of that. Of course, I knew long since that Texas 
has a warm though variable climate, and a soil generally, though not 
uniformly, fertile. Few who read considerably can need to be told 
so much. Let me endeavor to indicate the points on which obser- 
vation has modified my former impressions. 

I. Texas seems to be better timbered than any other prairie State 
with which I am acquainted. I do not mean that the timber is ex- 
ceptionally good, for it is not. Eastern Kansas, with her Hickory 
groves and the stately, luxuriant forests that cover the intervales 



24 LETTEBS FROM TEXAS. 

(" bottoms ") of her rivers, is decidedly ahead of her in this respect. 
But the prairies of Eastern Texas, though often large, are inter- 
iiipted, chequered, diversified, by clumps or groves of timber, as I 
never saw any other. Wherever water finds or makes a course, no 
matter how shallow or how generally dry, there trees spring up and 
struggle resolutely for existence. And, since these prairies and 
glades have been fed down by innumerable cattle, the annual prai- 
rie-fires, if not prevented, are so enfeebled, by the relative scantiness 
of their aliment, that they no longer charge upon and drive back the 
timber as they formerly did. It is plain that the forests are steadi- 
ly extending their boundaries on every side,while every tree cut out 
of them is replaced by half a dozen young ones. I judge that the 
increase of timber throughout the region I have traversed has been 
very great during the last ten years, and that it will continue for 
the next twenty, in spite of the rapid increase of population. 

As to quality, this timber is not what I could wish it. Oaks, ot 
almost every known variety, with two or three species of Pine, are 
most abundant ; while Cottonwood, White Ash, Pecan, Elm, Gum, 
ifec, garland the rivers and bayous. The Live Oak is quite common, 
and is a good timber-tree ; the long-leaf Pine is of tolerable quality, 
though not equal to our White Pine. But most of the Oak is 
" brash," as the woodmen say — that is, it lacks toughness and elas- 
ticity. Much of it is low and scrubby, but the young trees, growing 
thickly, promise to be tall and comj^aratively limbless. I hope 
their timber will prove more elastic than that it replaces. I would 
gladly hear that Hickory, Locust, Larch, and other desirable spe- 
cies, are extensively planted ere long. As yet, more sawed Pine is 
imported (especially for bridge-building) than I wish was needed. 

II. As to the Soil, I have seen few acres that would not yield 
good crops to good cultivation ; but this is exjjected of a prairie 
country. Some of the pine-covered lands, especially near the Gulf, 
seem but moderately fertile ; a part of the upland " Oak openings " 
only a little better. On the other hand, the river bottoms, espe- 
cially those of the Brassos, are very fertile, as annually overflowed in- 
tervales are apt to be. Here, however, the inundations are frequent 
and of enormous extent, so that I judge the intervales of the Trinity, 
Brassos, Colorado, &c., deeper and richer than those of the Connec- 
ticut, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, or Potomac, ever wei-e or 
could be. I never saw better soil than the Brassos bottoms. 

] was more surprised, however, by the remarkable fertility of the 



now THEY LIVE IN TEXAS. 25 

rolling prairies, especially those of Washington County, on either 
side of Brenham, its capital. These have been twenty to thirty 
years planted to Corn or Cotton, never manured, and cultivated so 
shallowly that every rain sweeps off thousands of tons of their soil 
to be borne into the Gulf by the Brassos or squandered upon its 
intervales. Yet these prairies still sustain and mature bounteous 
harvests ; and no wonder, since their black mold ranges from two 
to five feet in depth. Mellow, dry, breezy, healthful, I do not see 
how these lands could be made more inviting. 

The level prairies are of good quality, though not equal in the 
' average to those just spoken of. They may average a foot of daik 
mold, generally overlying clay. They are mainly left in a state of 
nature, and devoted to the rearing of cattle, which are sold at three 
or four years old for ^10 to $20 per head to drovers or packers. 
Tens of thousands in good condition have been slaughtered' for their 
hides and tallow — the flesh, after yielding all its tallow, being fed to 
swine. This, I 'trust, is ended; it certainly will be when the first 
I'ailroad shall have connected the valley of the lower Colorado with 
that of the Missouri or the Ohio. As yet, the State is full of 
cattle, and will be for a few years longer ; but they must ultimately 
give place to tillage. Whenever lands devoid of stnmp or stone, 
equal to those of the Connecticut valley, and within four days by 
rail of New York, shall be worth $5 j^er acre, these prairies will be 
gradually inclosed, broken up by the Steam Plow, surface-drained 
by gigantic machines, and cultivated for Corn, Cotton, Wheat, or 
some choice Grass ; and then Cattle will gradually disappear, or be 
reared in some more civilized fashion. At present, they simply 
hold the ground till Cultivation shall be ready to claim it. 

III. Whether it be a recommendation or not, I jiidge that it has 
required less eifort to live in Texas than in any other State of the 
^ Union. The common saying, " It costs no more to rear a cow 
here than a hen at the North," is literally true. The cow was 
never fed, never sheltered, no matter how cold or stormy the 
weather ; and you might have ten thousand head of cattle ranging 
the prairies and openings without owning an acre of land on earth. 
Many a man has thus grown rich without effort and almost without 
thought. 

Rich, but to little present pui'pose. His home was a rude cabin, 
with little or no glass in its windows, and nothing but dirt on its 
floors. His children grew up unschooled and rude-mannered. His 



26 LETTERS FKOM TEXAS. 

wife was slatternly, deprived of society, and rendered unhappy by 
memories of better times and more congenial associations. Man 
lives as a herdsman mainly on horseback, in the open air, often 
meeting acquaintances or strangers ; Woman, being confined to her 
small, rough cabin, found therein no solace, no comfort, but in her 
children. The partnership was not an equal one ; there was no 
similarity in its conditions. There are proud and happy wives in 
Texas as elsewhere, but the rancher's life has not tended to make 
them so. I am glad that I can see to the end of it. And I trust 
that the ranchemen's wives are even gladder than I am. 

While Slavery lasted in Texas, any decided change was hardly 
possible. The tillere of her soil were slaves. White men almost 
uniformly refused to " make niggers of themselves" by plowing and 
hoeing ; but they did not hesitate to mount a horse and gallop after 
a herd of Cattle. Boys early learned to lasso a steer or colt ; they 
liked the herdsman's life, with its excitements and adventures ; it was 
the next thing to a bviffalo-hunt. Land had no value; products, 
unless near navigable water, next to none. Many a man has been 
unable to sell his Corn at 25 cents per bushel in one County, when 
no better Corn was wanted at six times that price in another ; im- 
passable streams and unfathomable roads separating them. So the 
owner of five thousand cows was often for weeks without flour 
bread, and veiy rarely had either Cheese, Butter, or Milk ; " hog 
and hominy " were his staples for diet ; Fruit he seldom tasted ; 
Tobacco and Whisky were his only luxuries. 

So much for the Past. I will speak of the Future in my next. 

H. G. 



TEXAS... THE FUTURE OF THE STATE... ITS RAILROADS. 

[EDITOKIAL CORRESPONDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.] 

CoLTiMBUS, Colorado Co., Texas, May 2G. — Before I dilate on the 
bright fut\ire now opening before this State, let me indicate some 
of the drawbacks which have hitherto retarded her material and 
still more her intellectual and moral progress. 

JBad water is qxiite often the accompaniment of very good land ; 
and South- Eastern Texas has little that is good. I have now travel- 
ed over nearly every completed mile of her railroads without having 



DRAWBACKS ON LIFE IN TEXAS. 27 

been offered one glass of water from spring or well. Eain-water is 
very generally drank ; nearly every tolerable dwelling being pro- 
vided with a tank or reservoir for keeping it, oftener underground. 
As veiy many lack even this, the excuse for drinking bad coffee, 
or worse whisky, is here stronger than almost anywhere else. That 
springs are very rare, while well-water is uniformly undrinkable, is 
certain ; but why each city and considerable village has not tried to 
obtain better, by sinking to a depth of two or three hundred feet 
(not ex2)ecting the fluid to rise to the surface and flow over, on the 
Artesian plan, but drawing it up by wind or other power), I do not 
understand. The muddy product of the rivers, creeks, bayous, and 
sloughs, which the cattle must imbibe per force, cannot but be prejudi- 
cial to their health and thrift ; to say nothing of the dry seasons, 
when even this detestable stufi" can hardly be obtained. The suffering 
of animals from thirst, and from the villainovis witch-broth wherewith 
they must quench it, must work them serious harm. If I were a herds- 
man here, I would have better water for my stock, or I would 
sink at least three hundred feet in quest of it. 

Sad roads and other impediments to inter-communication have 
sadly crippled Texas, and still ci-ipple her. Her crops, as a gene- 
ral rule, have cost the grower more after than before harvest. 
Though oxen and horses have long been abundant and cheap, the 
wheat-growers up ISTorth could reach no market with their product 
unless at ruinous cost, while the lower counties were importing 
Flour at the rate of three thousand barrels per day. A State whose 
chief products are Grass and Cattle, has imported both Hay and 
Milk ; her herdsmen, as a general i-ule, never see either. A purely 
agricultural State that buys most of her bread, a splendid soil for 
Corn on a good part of which Corn is dearer to-day than in New- 
York City, a capital State for growing Swine at no cost, yet 
which has bought three-fourths of the Hams universally consumed 
by her people — such are among the causes which have hb])t her 
people poor in spite of the remarkable fertility of her soil. Her 
I'ivers, creeks, and bayous, rarely bi'idged, are subject to great and 
sudden floods, whereby teamsters are often imprisoned for days 
between two creeks which in dry seasons are waterless, and halted 
by a river for weeks. Bvit for Railroads, Texas is doomed by nature 
to stagnation, impotence, and barbarism. 

As yet, she has barely begun to be penetrated by railroads. A 
line north by west from Galveston to Houston (50 miles), and 



28 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. 

thence by Hempstead, Navasota, Bryan, Hearne, &c., to Groesbeck, 
in Limestone County, soon to be extended to Corsicana, in Navarro 
County (say 250 miles from Galveston), witli a branch from Hemp- 
stead westward across the Brassos through Washington County to 
Giddings, 55 miles, soon to be extended 50 miles further to Austin, 
the State Capital, with another from Harrisburg, 6 miles below 
Houston, through Foi-t Bend and Colorado Counties, across both 
the Brassos and Colorado to this point (84 miles) : such are about 
all the pieces of i-ailroad now in o^jeration in the State. The 
piece from Shreveport, Louisiana, westward through Hariison and 
Smith Counties to Hallsville (56 miles), is rather a suggestion than 
a practical road. And these are about all that are in operation to- 
day. The work of providing this people with necessary railway 
communication is barely well begun. 

But that is half the battle. At last, nearly every line seems 
to be in the hands of solvent, capable, upright men, who are backed 
by ample capital, and is pushed with vigor and clear-sighted reso- 
lution. The Texas Central is going right on north by west to meet 
one of the Missouri-Kansas roads at the north line of the State, 
near Gainesville or Sherman. A new road (" The Great North- 
ern "), well backed by Northern capital, pushes directly north 
from Houston, crossing the Southern Pacific near Tyler, strikes the 
Red Eiver near Fort Towson, and connects with the Missouri, Kan- 
sas and Texas from Kansas near that point. The " Chattanooga 
and Mobile " is now pushing due westward through Louisiana, and 
expects to reach HoiTston before this time next year. These, with 
the Southern Pacific, now certain to be vigorously prosecuted, will 
give Texas not less than 1,000 miles of completed railroad -wdthin a 
year, and 1,500 within two years. 

But the most important and efiective single line of railroad in 
the State is " The International," which is to connect at Fulton, Ar- 
kansas, on her north-eastern border, with one from Cairo, 111., and 
thus with Chicago and New York, running diagonally through 
Texas from north-east to south-west, crossing the Southern Pacific 
and " The Great Northern " near Tyler, the " Texas Central " at 
Heame, and thence pushing straight for Austin, the capital, and 
hence to San Antonio, and so to the Bio Grande not far from 
Laredo. This road, though begun last November at Hearne, 
where it crosses the " Texas Central," and impeded by the necessity 
of importing Corn at a cost of |2.1() per bushel and Hay at $85 per 



TEXAS AS A LAND OF PROMISE. 29 

tun for its oxen and mules, lias been pushed right vigorously in 
either direction, and will have crossed both the Brassos and Col- 
orado, and i-eached Austin on the one hand, the Trinity on the 
other, by next May. Two years hence, it will have been completed 
from Fulton to San Antonio (400 miles), and will then have 
brought the heart of this State within four days' travel of the 
Commercial Emporium, where it will be known as one of the most 
judicious and successful railway enterprises ever planned. It will 
carry more Beef Cattle than any road on the globe, and it will bring- 
in to Texas more immigrants than railroad ever carried into any 
State till now. 

I close with a single instance of the spirit in which our Northern 
railroad-builders are met by the people of Texas. The Legislature 
having granted a' liberal subsidy in State Bonds to the Southern 
Pacific Road, Gov. Davis felt constrained to veto the bill. The 
Legislature thereupon repassed it by a vote of seven or eight to one 
in either House ; and the Democratic vote in the affirmative was, 
like the Republican, all but unanimous. And, while no man ques- 
tions the purity of the Governor's motives, I have heard no dissent 
from the satisfaction with which the triumph of the measure is 
received. 

— I hope to leave Texas on my homeward way very soon, having 
been dissuaded by heavy and extensive rains from my purpose of 
reaching Austin and perhaps San Antonio on the one hand, or Tyler, 
Marshal], and Shreveport, on the other. The time does not serve 
for stage-rides or other travel oft' the line of operated Railroads. 

H. G. 



TEXAS AS A LAND OF PROMISE. 

[EDITOKIAL CORRESPONDENCE OP THE TRIBUNE.] 

Galveston, Texas, May 27. — Texas is as large as France, with 
a more genial climate and far richer soil. She has to-day less than 
One Million inhabitants, while France (as reduced by the late war) 
has more than Thirty-six Millions. She has more and better Timber, 
and more Cattle and Horses than France ; why shovild not her for- 
tieth part of France's population be rapidly increased to a twentieth, 
a tenth, and, before the close of this century, to a fifth or fourth ? 



30 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. 

Why should not this State be the home of Ten Millions of the 
human family early in the next century ? 

Before deciding to say a word in favor of Texas as a home for 
those as yet strangers to her, I made inquiry and satisfied myself 
that her wild lands are not merely cheap to-day, but certain long to 
remain so. They are held in tracts of a thousand to many thousands 
of acres, by men of limited means, who bought them for a song, or 
obtained them without price by Mexican concession, and who have 
held them to this day partly because wild lands paid no taxes, and 
partly because they could find no purchasers : every one who either 
had property or aspired to have being already gorged with wild 
land. Now all is changed. Slavery being dead, lands are in request 
and have a value, which railroads are ra^iidly doubling and quad- 
rupling. Taxes are high and rising ; Common Schools and State 
loans to Railroads are certain to enhance them ; so that moneyless 
holders of unproductive tracts tmist sell or be sold out by the sher- 
iff and tax-collector. I am sure that at least One Hundred Millions 
of fertile acres are to-day owned by men who must sell them within 
the next five years. And this necessity is sure to keep down prices. 
Let me, then, give some idea of their range. 

I traversed yesterday the railroad which runs westward from 
Harrisburg near Houston, through Harris, Fort Bend, and Colorado 
Counties, by Richmond to Columbus, 83 miles. Most of this route 
lies through a rich, level prairie, covered with Horses and Cattle ; 
but Timber is always in sight on one side or on both, and we pass 
through the genei'ally forest-covered intervales of the Brassos and 
Colorado, with those of Oyster Creek, San Bernard, and Caney. 
This is one of the earliest settled portions of Texas, and its popula- 
tion has largely increased since the war. I was avithorized by Mr. 
Wm. Brady of Houston to offer a league of it (4,400 acres), includ- 
ing a sufficiency of timber and water, for $1 per acre ; but, if that 
should not meet the views of pioneers, he would survey it into farms, 
and give alternate tracts of 100 acres to industrious, sober, thrifty 
pioneers who would settle upon and convert them into productive 
homesteads. And I have been assiired by othei's that a colony of 
two or thi'ee hundred Northern farmers and mechanics could obtain 
lands for settlement on like terms in almost any part of the State. 

Do not jump at the mistaken conclusion that the landholdei-s of 
Texas are exceptionally philanthropic and generous. They make 
no pretensions to this character. They want to make their lands 



rNDEVELOPED EESOTJRCES OF THE SOUTH. 31 

valuable and marketable ; to wliich end, they will sometimes give 
away a part to enhance the value of the remainder. Only a few 
will do this ; but almost any one will sell a part very cheap in or- 
der to obtain a price for the rest. And they are quite aware that 
a Yankee or German colony raises the value of the lands all aroimd 
it. 

The Railroads are in like circumstances. Some of them have 
land-grants ; all want the population and prodiiction along their lines 
rapidly increased. Their interest leads them to invite settlement 
and encourage the transfer of lands from non-residents to cultivators. 
Hence, while lands near railroad junctions and other locations of 
predicted cities are held for higher rates, I judge that half the soil 
of Texas is this day in market at prices ranging from 50 cents to 
$2 per acre, and that $1 per acre in cash would buy the greater portion 
of it. And, while a rapid rise along some of the railroad lines is 
inevitable, I judge that $2 per acre will buy good wild laud in this 
State for at least ten years to come. 

The least favorably situated of this vacant land is more eligibly 
located to-day than the best was twenty years ago. Railroads are 
bringing markets and comforts to every man's door. Milk sells for 
$1 per gallon in this city ; there is not a quart of it to every thou- 
sand cows throughout the State ; and you whiten your tea or coffee 
with the condensed article from New York or you don't whiten it at 
all, even at petty hamlets in the far interior, where a likely cow and 
calf will bring not more than $10. 

As yet, the Mineral wfealth of this State sleeps undisturbed and 
useless. She has Iron enough to divide the earth by railroads into 
squares ten miles across ; but no tun of it was ever smelted. She 
has at least five thousand square miles of Coal (probably much 
more) ; but no tun of it was ever dug for sale. She has Gypsum 
enough to plaster the continent annually for a century ; but it lies 
inert and valueless-— a waste of earth-covered stone. She has more 
land good for Wheat than Minnesota, yet imports nearly all her 
Flour ; she has millions of acres of excellent Timber, yet builds 
mainly of pine from Louisiana and Florida ; she sends to the Ohio 
for her Hams and to New York for her Butter, and would import 
Berries and Fruits if her people had not learned, while they were 
unattainable, to do without them. If ten thousand Northern farm- 
ers would settle just below Houston, and devote themselves to 
supplying that city and this with fresh Milk, Butter, Strawberries, 



32 LETTERS FROM TEXAS. 

Raspberries, Peaches, Grapes, &c., they might charge double prices, 
and get rich faster than so many cultivators ever did before. They 
would have to make their own Ice, but that is not difficult ; they 
might have to teach the Texas Central how to run a milk-train fifty 
miles ; but that need not exhaust their energies. Their pasture- 
land, fenced, might cost them $10 per acre just around a depot and 
a junction; their cows might be picked at $15 per head; and they 
would soon sell Hay enough at 200 per cent, profit to defray the 
cost of feeding and shedding their stock. This is but one of a hun- 
dred equally promising enterprises now impatiently awaiting the 
right men to direct them. Who will send them along ? 

H. G. 



GLEANINGS FROM TEXAS. 

[EDITORIAL CORRESPOKDENCE OF THE TRIBUNE.] 

New Orleans, La., May 29. — Texas is a great State geographi- 
cally, with immense natural resources and gigantic possibilities ; 
but she has not yet justified her early promise. Her wealth in 
soil and cattle, with the ease wherewith an abundance of food may 
be secured from these with little labor, has blinded her people to 
many shortcomings which should not have endured or been endured 
so long. Her habitations, as a whole, are far smaller, ruder, and 
less comfortable, than they might and should be. She ought to 
pay for ten million panes of glass, and hire ten thousand glaziers to 
set them directly. She is in urgent need of twenty thousand more 
school-teachers and fifty thousand instructed cooks. It is a grief 
to see beef that might be broiled into tender and juicy steaks fried 
or stewed into such repulsive, indigestible messes as I have en- 
countered at all but her two best hotels. It is a crying shame fov 
a region where the Peach, the Grape, the Pear, the Strawberry, 
&c,, grow so luxuriantly and bear so bounteously, to be living almost 
entirely on Meat, Bread, and Coffee, even if these articles were what 
they should be, and in Texas are not. In Labrador or Alaska, 
such a "hog and hominy" diet would be faulty; under this fervid 
sun, it is atrocious. ISTo family which has been five years or over 
in Texas has any right to live so badly. 

I judge that there are, at the outside, fifty acres of cultivated 
Berries of all kinds in the State, perhaps as many of Grapes, and 



IMPEDIMENTS TO TRAVEL IN TEXAS. 33 

possibly one Peach-tree to each family, though I consider that a 
high estimate. At all events, not one family in every ten has either 
fruit-tree, grape-vine, or sti'awberry-bed, down to this hour; and 
fruit makes no part of the average meal. Yet the profusion of 
wild grapes (Mustang) in the Brasses bottoms, covering nearly 
every tree for miles after miles, argues that choice Grapes would 
grow here if any one would only plant them ; while I know that 
Peaches and Strawbex'ries are haixlly anywhere more luxviriant or 
prolific. Almost every one owns land ; those who do not, easily 
might ; but the great majority seem content to live as the pioneers 
of Texas had to, on coarse, gross food alone, when they might have 
Fruits, Milk, &c., by moderate exertion. The girls woi-king in 
Lowell factories would strike the first day that they were fed like 
the family of a Texas planter who owns five thousand acres of land 
and a large stock of cattle. 

I speak of these things at the risk of giving ofiense, because they 
ought to be discussed till corrected. The Texas pioneer, living a 
hundred miles fi'om anywhei'e, with a neighbor to each ten miles 
square, no roads and no bridges, had to fare as he could. That is 
no reason for cherishing his privations after all excuse for them 
has passed away. If half the money spent in the State for Liquors 
and Tobacco were devoted to making dwellings comfortable and 
supplying their tables with fruits, &c., the whole people would be 
happier and better. 

A few words as to the cities : 

I missed Austin, the State capital, by an accident and an all-night 
thunderstorm, which stopped me at Giddings, the present western 
terminus of the Texas Central Railroad, leaving 55 miles (rapidly 
diminishing) of staging over ti-acks which might be converted into 
roads were not the railroads so soon to supersede their most impor- 
tant use. As they are, 18 hours are usually required to traverse' 
them ; but the stages which I didn't take at Giddings had not reached 
Austin two days after they started — the usually dry water-courses 
haA'ing been converted by the rain into raging torrents which could 
not be crossed. Had I duly reached Austin, I hoped thence to make 
New-Braunfels, the nucleus of the principal German settlement in 
Texas and the seat of considerable manufacturing industry, and 
thence (if possible) San Antonio, the Capital and pride of Western 
Texas, which boasts a population of 15,000, with a tendency to rapid 
increase. Within two years, it will have been reached by the Tnter- 
3 



34 . LETTERS FROM TEXAS. 

national Railroad from Austin and the north-east, and by that from. 
Columbus, connecting it with Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, 
and MobDe ; when its population will go up like a balloon to 50,000, 
if not higher. I am assured that they have good (though hard) 
spring water near the Capital and all these Western cities, which 
made it harder for me to turn back without reaching them. 

Galveston seemed to me a little nervous lest the railroads now in 
progress should draw off her trade and leave her hard aground ; which 
does not to me seem probable. Her relative importance may be 
reduced by them, bxit I judge that her actual trade will be largely 
increased. She has by far the best harbor in the State, with a pri- 
macy already achieved which will not lightly depart. I profoundly 
trust that she may soon and forever lose the profit she now derives 
from the importation and distribution of all the Flour and most of 
.the Hams and other Pork consumed in the lower half of the State, 
drawing her own supplies from Northern Texas by rail instead; but 
Texas will always grow Cotton for export, and most of it will find 
its way to the North and to Europe through Galveston. Sugar 
will txe made on the coast and distributed throughout the interior 
.via Galveston; while Beef, Hides, Tallow, and ultimately Com, 
Hams, Wool, ttc, will be exported thence, and many cargoes of 
Dry Goods, Hardware, &c., be received and distribiited in return. 
.The vessels that take away the exports of Texas will come freighted 
■with imports. As her manufactures expand, she will require many 
j^hip-loads per annum of Coal from the Ohio before she can have 
a<4.ieved easy access to her own. Galveston must devote part of 
her wealth to making advantageous connections with all the great 
railroads that cross or reach the State ; she must work hard to im- 
prove or at least maintain the capacity and accessibility of her har- 
bor ; and she must resolutely fence out the Yellow Fever by internal 
purification as well as external vigilance, and her future is secure. 

Houston is now intent on so deepening and straightening her 
Bayou that any vessel that can pass the bar at Galveston may dis- 
cliarge at her wharves, 50 miles inland, and so much further on the 
-way to a large majority of Texan consumers. It is a spirited en- 
terprise, in good hands, well backed, and its early success fully as- 
sured. It will increase the trade of Houston, but will not aggran- 
. dize her at Galveston's expense to any such extent as is expected. 
Most of the vessels that cross the bar at Sandy Hook might go up 
to Newburgh or Poughkeepsie ; but they generally conclude to stop 



THE FKEEDMEN OF THE SOUTH. * 35 

at New- York. A correct history of the origin and daily growth of 
our city of Hudson might be read with profit by Houston and with 
comfort by Galveston. They are two smart, young, growing com- 
mvmities, and not half so much in each other's way as they fancy. 
If Galveston stood twenty feet higher above the surface of the Gulf, 
Houston rejoiced in a few hills and ledges, and each of them were 
blessed with water to drink other than as it falls from heaven, I 
should like them' even better than I do. As she is, Houston is one 
of the loveliest cities that ever rose from a level plain, and stands 
so high above the Bayou that she may cleanse and keep sweet if she 
only will. 

It remains only to say that, though the early Spring was rather 
backward and cold, followed by a dry time that stopped vegetable 
growth, the heavy rains of the last ten days have " made the crops," 
as they say — Com especially, which is planted more extensively than 
ever before. The foremost fields are now in tassel ; many are six 
feet in average Mght ; and the promise of a large yield is almost a 
certainty. Cotton is generally small as yet, but looks well. Other 
crops (except Beef ) are of little consequence. The general expec- 
tation is that Texas will produce far more Food in 1871 than in 
any former year, with less Cotton only because her planters have 
learned in the dear school of experience that those who till the 
earth can rarely afford to buy the bulk of their own food. 

H. G. 



THE CONDITION OF THE BLACKS. 
[editokial correspondence op the tribune.] 

Near Vicksburg, Miss., June 1. — During the last three weeks, 
I have made a point of inquiring of all classes as to the condition, 
conduct, and prospects, of the Freedmen throughout the Gulf States, 
The substance of the testimony thus elicited I sum up as follows : 

The planters who were formerly slaveholders have uniformly as- 
sured me that their ex-slaves are working better than they expected, 
and better this year than ever before. I cannot recollect a single 
dissent from this averment. Most of the old plantation hands either 
rent lands, paying so much Ootton per acre, or they work them on 
shares — say, half the crop when they find their own team and seed, 
and one-third when these are found by the land-owner. And it 



36 ♦ LETTER FROM MISSISSIPPI. 

has been found far more satisfactory to divide the crop at the gin- 
house or at the depot, letting each market for himself, than to have 
the land-owner sell it in bulk and account to the cultivator for 
his share of the proceeds. The negroes, keeping no accounts and 
not very careful in their habits, usually found, on settlement, that 
they had eaten up their crop while it was growing, and were often 
in debt after it had been sold and accounted for. No doubt, they 
were sometimes cheated ; but, even when they were not, they sup- 
posed they were. Esj^ecially when, as in 1866, the crop was a fail- 
ure, and their share of it did not rej^ay the land-owner his advances, 
they could not understand that, while " old master " had all there 
was, they had less than nothing. The system was bad, so its results 
were evil. It is far better where they have no credit, no advances, 
and struggle through the year as they can, so that their share of the 
crop, large or small, is all their own when it is ready for sale. On 
the crop of 1869, those who worked on this basis generally made 
money ; on that of 1870, which sold much lower, they made little 
or nothing ; this year, I am assured, they generally grow Corn as 
well as Cotton, hoping to make their own bread and meat, and leave 
their Cotton clear. Some will succeed in this ; others will fail ; but, 
taken in the average, I judge that the Freedmen of the Cotton 
States are this day in as good circumstances as the Hired Workers 
who till the soil of any European country. And I am confident 
that the plantation laborers are rarely or never in want of employ- 
ment or of homes. If there were profligate, idle, pilfering fellows 
among them, they have drifted away to the cities, or to some other 
covmtry than this. There is no place for such on plantations ; and 
very few of them could stay there if they would. 

The old slaveholders, on whose testimony I have mainly relied 
thus far, add that the Black women are not doing so well as the 
men, but are widely intent on finery and idleness. The children 
(the planters add) rule their parents, and do little or nothing ; so 
that, when this generation of field-hands, trained to steady work as 
slaves, shall have died off, matters will have changed for the worse. 
In opposition to this, I proffer the testimony of my eyes. To say 
that I have seen many more Black women than White persons 
plowing and hoeing in the Corn, Cotton, and Cane-fields of Louisiana 
and Texas, would be saying little ; I am sure I saw half as man^r 
Black women as Black men working the crops ; and in many cases 
father, mother, and one or two children, were at work together. On 



WHAT THE BLACKS SAT. . 37 

the whole, I must adjudge the question " Will free niggers work ? " 
satisfactorily answered. The Four and a Quarter Million bales of 
Cotton grown in the United States in 1870 are not to begainsayed. 

On another point, the testimony of the old masters is less assur- 
ing. They tell me that their ex-slaves spend their earnings unwise- 
ly, improvidently ; often squandsring in a month the hard earnings 
of a year. One planter instanced the case of a " boy," who recently 
bought at once seventeen "Shoo-Fly" boxes, price $1 each; their 
aggregate contents being worth perhaps |5, and consisting of candies 
and showy knick-knacks, with a silver half dollar perhaps in every 
'fifth box. The evidence to this effect is so positive and consistent 
that I cannot doubt its general truth. The ex-slave, ignorant and 
simple, finding himself for the first or second time possessed of 
$100 to |300, the price of his crop, is too apt to fool it away in 
purchases that wisdom would shun and reason must condemn. 

The Blacks themselves, through such as I have interrogated, give 
far more cheering testimony. They admit that fools as well as 
rogues are found among them, as among other races ; but they in- 
sist that the great majority are saving as well as earning. They 
assure me that many are buying lands ; others accumulating money 
in the Freedmen's Savings Bank with intent to own homes at no 
distant day ; and that nearly all are doing better from year to year. 
They say that most of those who own no lands own mules and 
plows, and are steadily learning to spend their money wisely or 
save it carefully. I have conversed with no Black who was not 
hopeful and confident as to the future of his race. The "carpet- 
baggers," so called, of course- confirm the testimony of the Blacks. 
Some of these are good and true men ; others aim to be particularly 
good to themselves. At the worst, it may be fairly urged in their 
behalf that the blind obstinacy and dogged refusal of the planters 
to recognize accomplished facts rendered them a necessaiy evil. 

The ancient aristocracy of the South remind me forcibly of the 
Federal squirearchy of our country after Jefferson's election as 
President. Instead of studying the new situation and seeking to 
master it, they content themselves with endless and fruitless com- 
plainings. They lament the sway of the "carpet-baggers" over 
their late slaves, but take no effective measures to counteract it. 
Rogues as some of the " carpet-baggers " are, they are all zealous for 
the education of the Blacks ; while the submerged aristocracy grudge 
every penny assessed on them for building school-houses and pay- 



88 LETTER FKOM TENNESSEE. 

ing teachers, as though it were to be thrown into the sea. The 
noblest, pl^rest, most intelligent women of New England, who have 
come clown here to teach Black children, are shunned and banned 
by the aristocracy as though they were camp-followers of Sherman's 
army, and, being thus doomed to associate only with Blacks and 
live with them, are actually charged with this as a betrayal of low 
tastes, when it was the dictate of stern necessity. I apprehend 
that the land-owners will in time be impelled by their hate of 
" carpet-baggers " to change their course, and seek a cordial under- 
standing with the Blacks ; but they are not yet in the mood; and 
the longer they hold off the mox-e diificull the task will prove, 

H. G. 



THE CONDITION OF THE WHITES. 

[EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENCE OP THE TRIBUNE.] 

Memphis, Tenn., June 3. — " Are you not satisfied that the South 
has no desire that Slavery be reestablished?" I have often been 
asked. I answer, I am entirely confident that no considerable 
number of the Southern people either expect or pui'pose to reenslave 
their former chattels. They no more expect that than the faded 
dandy of fifty full years expects to awake to-morrow morning radiant 
in the pink-and-white bloom of one-and-twenty — no more than the 
toper, who has broken his jug and seen the thirsty sand swallow the 
last drop of its precious contents, expects to get drunk to-morrow 
on that squandered liquor. None know better than the great body 
of the Southern Whites that the reenslavemeut of the Freedmenisa 
moral impossibility. 

But, if you mean to ask, "Would the ex-slaveholders choose to 
have their former slaves restored to them as chattels, if they could f " 
I answer that I am very thankful that the temptation is mercifully 
withheld. Wise and thoughtful men there are among them who 
sincerely, profoundly rejoice that American Slavery is dead be- 
yond the hope of resui'rection ; but these are not the majority. I 
am confident that two-thirds of the men, with nine-tenths of the 
women, who formerly composed the slaveholding caste, would this 
day give half their houses and lands to have their slaves back again, 
just as they j)ossessed them in 1860. They sigh for the good old 



THE WHITE VIEW OF EMANCIPATION. 39 

times when every " nigger " obeyed orders without dreaming of re- 
sistance or demur, and without expecting any pay. They consider 
themselves robbed by Emancipation, and would like their " property " 
back again or its value in some equivalent. It goes against the grain 
with many of them to bargain with their late chattels for service, 
and be sued if they do not fulfill their contracts. Their instincts, 
their training, their habits, are shocked by this, just as yours would 
be if your horse cited you before a co'art and compelled you to show 
cause for not paying him ten dollars per month for last year's 
, service. 

Then the very general complaint that " we can't control our labor " 
has a very real foundation. Under the old regime, the slaves had 
their holidays and theii- easy times ; but, when the Cotton-fields had 
been filled with grass during three or four rainy weeks in May, 
wherein little could be done, all hands were called out at daylight 
so soon as the soil was fit for plowing, and kept hard at work all 
the bright hours till the crop was "laid by." Again, when the 
jiicking season commenced, all hands — men, women, and children — 
were called into the fields, and kept at work from daylight till dark, 
till the crop was secured. If any lagged or shirked, the whip speedily 
brought them to their bearings. All this is changed by Emancipa- 
tion. Men talk of so many hours to the day's work; women and 
children are apt to shun field-work; so a given "foi-ce" — say twenty 
families — will not pick so much cotton in the month as they did ten 
years ago. And nearly every negro aspires to be the master of his 
own time, and either rent land or work it on shares, in preference 
to hiring out by the month or season. Perhaps this is best for all 
concerned; but it sadly dwarfs the planter's consequence, and in 
most cases his profits also. He does n't like it : can you wonder? 

And the change bears much harder on his wife. She had her 
labors and her cares under the old system : she was no idler, no 
trifler ; her duty and her interest combined to render her physician- 
in-ordinary and head-nurse to her Black dependents ; and she often 
gave anxious days and nights to a struggle with disease at a slave's 
bedside. But cooking, washing, and other house-work, she was 
never bred to ; and the fall of Slavery threw them all upon her at 
a moment's notice, requiring her at once to do them and to learn 
how. Even when ex-slaves remained with her as hii-ed servants, 
they were no longer docile and obedient as of old, when it was an 
envied privilege to serve in the big house rather than plow or pick 



40 THE " POOR AVHITES " OF THE SOUTH. 

in the fields, and the whip was always in reserve in case of need. 
Thus Emancipation has borne heavily on the wives of the old aris- 
tocracy, and (not being politicians) they do not even affect to 
welcome the change. Many of the wisest and most resoliite among 
them have learned to do their own work, with their daughters' help ; 
some have obtained White help, mainly of foreign birth ; others are 
doing with hired Black servants, but most of these get on badly. 
Thus the female aristocracy of the South are still averse to the 
great change they have witnessed ; and years must pass before they 
can be reconciled to it. 

I learn with great satisfaction that there is a decided improve- 
ment manifest among the "poor Whites." These formed, under 
Slavery, the most hopeless class in the South. Courted by the aris- 
tocracy for their votes, flattered with their rank as members of the 
dominant caste, allowed to build their shanties on the outskirts of 
the great plantations, and to breed and train, dogs to hunt runaway 
slaves in the swamps and denser forests, they grew up unlettered 
and irreligious, hunted and fished half their time, grew a patch of 
corn on suflerance, had a pig running in the woods, and lived a 
thriftless, aimless, worthless life. They were far more fanatical in 
their devotion to Slavery than the slaveholders, who seldom defiled 
their hands with the mobbing of an Abolitionist, since the " poor 
Whites " were too ready to take the job off" their hands. For some 
time after the collapse of the Rebellion, these spent most of their 
time idling at the cross-roads store or some convenient grog-shop, 

cursing the Yankees and wondering " why the d niggers do n't 

go to work ; " but of late a change is apparent. Certainly, there 
are idle, trifling "poor Whites" still, as there are equally worthless 
Blacks ; but they are fewer than they htive been, and growing fewer 
day by day. They do not work so resolvitely, so persistently, as do 
their counterparts at the North ; but work is no longer disreputa- 
ble, and many who did not average a fair day's work per week 
under Slavery do three or four days' work per week under Fi-eedom. 
The " corn-crackers," " sand-hill ers," " clay-eaters," &c., of the last 
generation, will be unknown as a class after this century. 

That those who struggled and fought for Secession generally 
believe they were right in so doing, I cannot doubt. Jefferson 
Davis's late speeches fairly express their average convictions and 
feelings. But, while they still aflSrm the right of Secession, I am 
satisfied that a majority of them believe its pi-actical assertion was 



PEOGKESS AT THE SOUTH. 41 

unwise and inexpedient. They hold that they should have made 
their late struggle in the Union, not against it — under the flag of 
our fathers, not that of the Stars and Bars- — in ostensible defense of 
the Federal Constitution, not in resistance to its avithority. They 
purpose to renew the fight, but not with gun and saber. They 
expect to regain as Democrats through elections the power they lost 
as Rebels through war. They herein evince that wisdom which 
profits by the lessons of experience. Hei'e and there a hot-head 
may talk of renewing, at some more auspicious season, the struggle 
for an independent Confederacy ; but the great majority have had 
euoxigh of war. I conclude tkat another Southern Secession is all 
but impossible. 

And, while a bitter spirit is cherished by many, I feel sure that 
the number who acquiesce, if they do not absolutely rejoice, in the 
restoration of the Union, is daily increasing. Thovisands hate tlie 
" carpet-baggers," with their alleged corruptions and spoliations, 
who protest that they do not hate the Union. They persist in a 
clamor against what they call " nigger equality " (but which means 
Negro Enfranchisement, Negro Education), which precludes their 
swaying the Negi'o Vote as they otherwise might and would ; but 
they will seek to coerce enough of it into voting the Democratic 
ticket to give them a majority of the Southern Electoral Votes for 
next President. But the Blacks grow year by year more inde- 
pendent in fact as well as feeling ; and it will neither be easy nor 
safe to repeat tlie terrorism whereby Georgia and Louisiana were 
made to vote for Seymour in 1868. Should the South show an 
anti-Republican majority in -1872, it will be a conseqiience of inju- 
dicious appointments and removals, of actual or reputed prodigality 
in legislation or in ofiice, or of terrorism and constraint exercised 
over the voters, and not a decision of the people on the questions 
which vitally difference the two parties. 

That the Soxith is steadily recovering from the calamities and 
losses consequent on our late Civil War, is very obvious. The 
process might be more rapid, but could hardly be more substantial. 
The cattle and swine which were eaten up during the Civil War 
are being steadily replaced, and are already twice or thrice as 
numerous as they were six years ago ; lands are going back into 
cultivation which have long lain waste and idle ; farm buildings 
are undergoing renovation ; cities and villages, are extending their 
borders ; factories and furnaces are widely projected, and some are 



42 ME. GKEELEY S WELCOIVIE TO NEW TOKK. 

in process of construction. It were irrational to expect that all the 
bitterness engendered by twenty years of sectional collision, in- 
cluding four of bloody war, should be effaced in a day, and of course 
it is not ; but the tendency is right, and Time will exert its healing 
influence if no untoward event should interpose to prevent it. With 
a mingling of firmness in upholding the right, with kindness to those 
who were miseducated into wrong, the re-cementing of the Union 
will be thorough and enduring. H. G. 



RECEPTION OF MR. GREELEY, N. Y., JUNE 12Tn. 

Horace Greeley was welcomed at the Lincoln Club-Rooms, in 
Union Square, by a large number of friends who were assembled 
under the auspices of the Union Republican General Committee, 
and who severally congratulated him upon his safe return from his 
journey to the far South- West, and through the Lower Mississipjii 
Valley. The rooms were profusely decorated with flags and 
flowers, and tables well provided with refreshments were set. 
A large oil-painting of Mr. Greeley occupied a conspicuous place 
in the main room, and in the others were varioixs photographs and 
lithographs of him. A plaster bust of Mr. Greeley, cast some 
twenty years ago, also attracted much attention. On the balcony 
outside was placed a large bust of Lincoln, wreathed in bunting. 
In the street, in front of the Club-Rooms, a platform was erected 
for speaking, and around it were assembled, by 8 o'clock, many 
thousand peojile. Calcium lights made the scene almost as bright 
as day. 

Among those present in the Club Rooms and upon the platform, 
were Wm. M. Evarts, Gen. N. P. Banks, D. D. Conover, Marshall 
O. Roberts, Dr. Geo B, Loring, Lloyd Aspinwall, Gen. P. H. 
Jones, Gen. Geo. W. Palmer, Gen. John Cochrane, Sinclair Tousey, 
Waldo Hutchins, Charles Ston-s, A. W. Leggatt, Joseph Howe, 
Wm. P. Richardson, Rufus F. Andrews, Thomas E. Stewart, Gen. 
H. A. Barnum, John V. Gridley, Benj. F. Manierre, Ira O. Miller, 
Enoch L. Fancher, L. H. Knapp, Geo. F. Coachmon, J. S. Ritter- 
band. Judge Slosson, Geo. P. Bradford, H. M. Williams, B. F. 
Mudgett, Geo. H. Van Cleft, Col. Willis, Major Haggerty, Morris 
EUinger, C. H. Cooper, Col. Fairman, and others. Mr. Greeley ap- 



MK. fanchek's address. 43 

peai'ed at a little before 9 o'clock, and was heartily cheered by 
those in the ci'owded rooms. After receiving a personal greeting 
from nearly every one present, he descended to the platform in front 
of the house. He was received with great applause, and Mr. Enoch 
L. Fancher, on behalf of the Union Republican Genei'al Committee, 
addressed him as follows : — 

Mr. Greeley : On behalf of the Union Republican General Cojii- 
mittee of the City of New York, and also of many others of your 
personal and political friends, I have the honor to welcome you 
home after your journey to a Southern State. We don't come, sir, 
with any set form of speech or any mere form of words, but we come 
to tender our heartfelt congratulations, and to express our gratifi- 
cation at seeing you again among us. We feel that your visit to a 
Southern State will have an influence beyond your own personal 
gratification and information ; for you, sir, were not only foremost 
in the support of the Union, in this State, when rebel ai'ms were 
I'aised against it, but you were also the foremost champion for 
peace and pacification in the whole country at large when those 
rebel arms Avere laid aside. And now we are glad to listen to your 
words of Avisdom and your counsels of peace. On behalf of the Com- 
mittee — your personal and political friends— 3'ou are tendered this 
compliment, which you see, in this shape — a spontaneous gathering 
of the people of this city ; and we welcome you to our circle — the 
society you have so long adorned — and to the fervent friendship of 
our hearts. 

Mr. Gi'eeley was greeted with renewed applause, and responded as 
folloAvs : — 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : It is not your fault, it was not 
the faidt of the Republican pai'ty, that the North and South failed 
to understand each other before they had sacrificed half a million 
of their best and bravest, burying them in bloody and untimely 
graves. There never was a time when the representative men of 
the South were not welcome to express their sentiments and 
enforce their convictions in any city or in any county of the 
Free North — in St. Lawrence, in Chautauqua, in Onondaga, or 
in Washington. There the eminent champions of Southern 
institutions and Southern principles were always sui-e to find a 
patient and respectful hearing. And I firmly believe that, if 
our leading Northern men had been equally free to traverse the 
South and there advocate boldly and fearlessly the doctrines 



44 MR. geeeley's kesponsb. 

whicli the North cherished, our terrible Civil War might have 
been averted. But such was not our privilege. There was no 
time while Slavery was dominant in the South that any represen- 
tative Northern man could have ti-aversed the South, and there 
boldly and openly asserted the convictions of the North. Never ! 
I recollect distinctly that, in that eventful winter of 1860-61, the 
correspondents of Tlie Tribune, whom we were obliged to keep tra- 
versing the South, were uniformly compelled to conceal their 
business and to deny their views. Brave and true men they were ; 
but they would have been torn to pieces as if by wolves if they had 
been known as Tribune correspondents. They dared not address 
their letters to 71ie Tribune office ; they had to address them to 
private individuals in different parts of the City, in order that we 
might receive them. So, during that momentous winter, I was, for 
the first time, invited to deliver a lecture in the border city of St. 
Louis, where there was already a rising Republican party. When 
I had arrived say within 100 miles of St. Louis — when I was at 
Springfield, 111. — I was met by a telegram from leading Republicans 
in St. Louis, advising me not to come ; my invitation was virtually 
withdrawn, and I was compelled to retui'n to the North. I was 
not exjiected to say one word in St. Louis concerning politics. I 
was j ourneying there at the invitation of a literary society to deliver 
a literaiy lecture ; yet, since now it is said that at that time The 
Tribune was aiding and inciting the Southern Secession, it may well 
be remembered that its editor was turned back from a border cit}' 
of the South, simply because it was proposed to have him deliver 
a literary lecture before a literary society. I wish it had been 
otherwise, and that we could have saved the half million of true 
and brave men whose lives have since been sacrificed, because the 
North and South failed to understand each other. 

Fellow-citizens, two months ago, I, for the first time, received a for- 
mal and commanding invitation to visit the extreme South -Western 
State of our common country. I at first declined peremptorily, believ- 
ing it impossible for me to spare time to make the journey requii-ed. 
But friends gathered around me ; invitation upon invitation poured 
m ; and finally leading men of our City — capitalists wlio were wisely 
and nobly investing their money in large sums to open up Texas to 
the world and bring her into free and untrammeled intercourse with 
the North — these, too, insisted that I should go. They said, " By all 
means go down to Texas, for in so doing you may render the whole 



INVITATION TO TEXAS NOMINATIONS. 45 

country a great service." There were so many of these urgent ap- 
peals to me to go there, that finally I reconsidered my determina- 
tion and consented to go. 

Now, fellow-citizens, I hear it suggested that I went to Texas 
with too much parade and circvimstance ; that I too often was 
found making sjjeeches from the platforms of cars and from the 
balconies of hotels, when it would have been much more dignified 
if I had simply delivered my Address at Houston and returned to 
you. Well, gentlemen, I fully concur in the justice of that criticism, 
and should have gladly deferred to it. Though all I did say was 
said in the hope of promoting a clearer and better understanding 
between the North and the South, I would have preferred to speak 
more deliberately and less frequently. But invitations to speak, 
poured in upon me by rail and by telegraph, were not less pressing 
than numerous. I could not find time even to acknowledge, much 
less accept, those invitations : so that a New-Orleans editor was 
excusable — though I trust not justified- — in suggesting that my 
farming, however indifferent, must be rather better than my breed- 
ing. [Laughter.] I answered when I could ; I consented when I 
could ; and for the rest I kept silence. 

And here, fellow-citizens, allow me to make some reply to a kin- 
dred criticism from like friendly sovirces. It is urged, in seve- 
ral journals, that my name has too often been before my countrymen 
in connection with office ; and I fully concur in that suggestion. 
If my own choice had been consulted, you know very well that 
it would not have been so. But I am, to some extent, a pub- 
lic man ; I am identified with party contests and party principles ; 
and I am known to have reproved and reproached better men 
than myself that they shrink from public life, leaving important 
offices to be filled by second-rate men, because first-rate men will 
not accept them. I have said this too often and too publicly to be 
able now to shrink entirely out of sight and refuse to do the very 
thing which I have required of others. So, then, during the last 
twenty years, if I recollect rightly, my name has been four times 
before you as a candidate ; once for the Constitutional Convention, 
in which I for some time earned $6 per day and paid $i for my 
board, and twice as a candidate for Congress: first in the lower 
district of this City, where I was perfectly certain to be beaten sev- 
eral thousand votes honestly and twice as many dishonestly. Our 
friends in 1866 saw fit to use my name for Congress in that diss- 



46 ME. Greeley's response. 

trict, where I have worked for the last forty years, where I know a 
great many people, and where whatever I may have of property or 
business is located. They put up my name and ran me for Con- 
gress, giving me all the Republican votes and some more. So, 
again last Fall, our friends in the Sixth District saw fit — when I 
was prostrated by sickness and unable to fulfill engagements to 
speak made for me by the State Committee — to unite on me as their 
candidate for Congress ; and they supported me in the face of 
twenty-eight hundred Democratic majority in the previous contest. 
I could not speak to them. I could not even visit them ; but I stood 
in my lot, and shared the fate of my party and its other candidates. 
Well, gentlemen, there was one other time. In the Fall of 1869, 
your State Convention met, nominated a most respectable and 
acceptable State Ticket, and adjourned. My name was not even 
thought of. But a few days later, consternation was spread by the 
news that three leading candidates on that ticket had peremptorily 
declined ; so your State Committee was hastily assembled, and saw 
fit — being obliged to make a second nomination in order not to let 
the election go by default and give up the Legislature without a 
struggle— to fill one of these places on the ticket with my name. 
I was not consulted. I knew nothing of their purpose. I was 
absent from the City, and only returned after all had been done, to 
be told, " Don't say a word ; you must stand ; that is the end of 
it ; " and I stood. 

Now, fellow-citizens, I am not at all grateful to the Republican 
party for these several nominations. I accepted them, as I accept 
any public duty that seems to be fairly incumbent upon me ; 
and I did what I could to secure the success of the ticket on which 
my name was printed. I am very grateful to those generous and 
gallant Republicans who, in the face of certain defeat, rallied around 
me and gave me a hearty support, ninning my name in each case 
a little ahead of the average of my ticket. For that support, I am 
grateful ; for the several nominations, not at all. 

But, gentlemen, the past is past. " Let the dead bury their 
dead." I am perfectly willing to pass receij)ts with the Republican 
party and say that our accounts are now settled and closed. They 
owe me nothing for being a Republican ; I could not have helped 
being one if I had tried ; and, being a Republican, it was in my 
nature to do all I could for the success of that party which em- 
bodied and enforced my personal convictions. I was just as grate- 



SPEECHES AT NEW ORLEANS AND COLUMBUS. 



47 



ful to you as you were to me. I was just as much obliged by your 
cooperation as you were by mine ; and there the matter ends. But 
for the future, I can say, gentlemen, fully and heartily, that I need 
no office, I desire no office, and, though 1 never shall decline any 
nomination that has not been offered me [laughter], I certainly 
shall seek no office whatever. I am with you and of you ; willing 
to do my part ; willing to bear my share of our responsibilities ; 
but I have work enough, reasonable pay for it, sufficient consider- 
ation, with too much notoriety ; and the more quiet and peaceful 
my remaining days may be, the better I shall be satisfied. 

Now, then, I went to Texas to deliver an Agricultural Address at 
Houston, and I delivered it. That was my work, and it was done. 
But, on my way down, a Club of Union soldiers now living in New 
Oi'leans pressed me to make a speech to them in their club-room, 
and I did so. I attempted in that speech to vindicate the right of 
this nation, this republic, to that vast Loiiisiana territory purchased 
by her money, and defended by the blood of her sons ; organized into 
States by her Congress, and so made an integi-al portion of this 
American Union. I argued that the southern part of the Missis- 
sip{)i Valley could not possibly wish to be separated from the 
northern part by two menacing lines of frowning fortresses and 
hostile custom-houses. I urged — as I always have believed — that 
never did the people living on the lower Mississippi, in their sober 
senses, seek to be divorced and alienated from the people of the 
upper Mississippi ; and I affirmed the right of the American peo- 
ple to navigate that great river, from the Rocky Mountains to the 
Gulf, unembarrassed and unimpeded by any boom across its channel 
or by any gimboats stationed on it to cause vessels to heave-to for 
custom-house scrutiny and examination. So I talked, because I so 
believed. 

Then, again, visiting the little city of Cokimbus, Texas — the 
only place I did visit on the western side of the Colorado river — 
I was, about this time of night, while sitting in my hotel, Avaited 
upon by a Gei-man deputation, who asked me to come over to their 
club- room and talk to them a little while, they being all loyal Union 
men. Well, I went over. They had a hastily assembled crowd, 
and I spoke for half an hour, perhaps, in vindication and explana- 
tion of the late great struggles for unity in this country and for 
unity in Germany ; for the defense and protection of these two 
great nations in their rights of territory and of nationality. I 



48 SPEECHES AT THE SOUTH. 

argued, as well as I could, that, though some men honestly believe 
that our struggle and the triumph therein of the National cause will 
tend to despotism on this continent, and that some so hold with 
regard to the German triumph in their great struggle, I, on the 
contrary, believe that the ultimate tendency and result of these 
two great consummations will be the promotion and advancement 
of liberal ideas and institvitions alike in the Old World and the 
New. 

Well, gentlemen, as I was leaving Texas, a pressing invitation 
was given me by the Republicans of Galveston to make a speech 
to them on the last night T spent in their State ; and I acceded to 
their request. I tiied before them to vindicate the North against 
the charges made against her in the Soiith, and to prove that the 
North did not make war on the South (as too many Southern peo- 
ple still believe she did). I tried to show them that the war was 
commenced in the South, by the South — nay, in Texas itself — by 
capturing, through treachery, the United States Army, and turn- 
ing its arms and munitions against the flag and against the integri- 
ty of our country ; and that, all the way through, we stood virtual- 
ly on the defensive, against what seemed to me a most indefensible 
and wanton aggression. I said what I could to vindicate the 
Noi'th from the reproach of malignity — of wishing to oppress or 
plunder or cripple the South ; and tried to make my Sovithern 
countrymen believe that we were all Americans, and all together 
interested in and striving for the prosperity and the growth of our 
whole widely-extended country. [Applause.] Such was my theme 
at Galveston. 

Well, gentlemen, I have heard it objected that, in my speech at 
New-Oi'leans, I asserted that, if there had been Universal Amnesty 
four years ago, there would have been no Ku-Klux in 1871. I do 
not think I said exactly that ; but 1 did say that I regarded the 
policy of excluding from office the leading men of the South as a 
very great mistake, and a very great injury to the National cause 
and to the Republican party. I said no more than Gen. Sickles had 
said in substance four years earlier, when he was Military Governor 
of South Carolina, and declared that he was crippled and enfeebled 
in his efforts to govern that State well by the fact that her best men, 
her most intelligent men, her most considerate and conservative men, 
were not available to him as magistrates, because of an exclusion 
whereof Andrew Johnson was the author. He said, " I cannot gov- 



TJOTVEESAL AMNESTY THE KU-KLUX. 49 

ern Soiitli Cai-olina as well as I coxild if I were able to choose her 
best men to help me, instead of her second-best." I am entirely of 
that conviction. I believe it was a mistake, when you allowed a mil- 
lion Confederates to vote for Members of Congress, to deny them 
the right to vote for just such men as they preferred. I believe their 
first-rate men would be safer and more useful in Congress than their 
second-rate men — better for us and better for their Country. [Ap- 
plause.] So I argued, because I so believed ; and still I say that, if 
the men were allowed to represent the South who express the senti- 
ment of the South — if the Toombses, Wises, and Wade Hamptons 
had been allowed to go to Congi-ess, and liad been sent there four 
years ago — the Republican pai'ty would have been a great deal 
stronger and Reconstruction very much fui'ther advanced and more 
certain than it is to-day. [Cries of " Bravo," and applause.] Why, 
gentlemen, whenever one of these extreme men say anything, you 
see it caught up and cariied all over the Union in the very jovirnals 
that insist on keeping those men out of Congress and in positions 
where their words carry with them the least possible weight. If 
their words are so beneficial and pregnant to us, why not let them 
speak where the whole country will heai' them ? [Applause.] 

Biit I have been asked, *' Are there any Ku-Klux down South ?" 
Yes, gentlemen, there are. They didn't come up to me and tell me 
they were Ku-Klux very often. They didn't undertake to perform 
their delicate operations upon me. I should have had very much 
more respect for them if they had. [Great laughter,] 

I am moved with profoimd disgust when I think of these men, 
covering themselves with second-hand calico, masking their faces) 
arming themselves to the teeth, and riding around to the cabins of 
poor, harmless negroes, dragging them from their beds, and whipping 
and maiming them until they are compelled to swear they will never 
again vote the Republican ticket. I hold that to be a very coward- 
ly procedure as well as a very base one ; and I hold it to be the duty 
of the Government of the Union to oppose with all its power and all 
its force every such execrable outrage as this. Do you tell me that 
those men are liable to State laws for the assaults and batteries 
they have committed ? I don't doubt it ; but I say they are also 
in substance and purpose traitors to the Government, rebels against 
its authority, and the most cowardly, skulking rebels ever known to 
this or any other country. [Applavtse.] 

I hold our Government bound, by its duty of protecting our citi- 
4 



50 THE SOUTHERN KU-KLUX^ — THE TEACHING WOMEN. 

zens in their fundamental rights, to j^ass and enforce laws for the 
extirpation of the execrable Ku-Klux conspiracy ; and, if it has 
not power to do it, then I say our Government is no Governrt.ent, 
but a sham. I, therefore, on every proper occasion, advocated and 
justified the Ku-Klux act. I hold it especially desirable for the 
South ; and, if it does not prove strong enough to effect its purpose, 
I hope it will be made stronger and stronger. [Api^lause.] 

Why, fellow-citizens, these very men that asked nie if I saw any 
Ku-Klux have themselves read the returns of the last Presidential 
election in Louisiana, when that State, with 30,000 Black majority 
on its registers, was made to vote for Seymoiir and Blair by more 
than 30,000 majority ; counties which had 3,000 negro voters alone 
giving three, two, one, and in several instances no vote at all, for 
Grant and Colfax. Now, friends, yoxx and they know perfectly well 
that this result was seciired by terror and by violence ; by telling 
those Black men, " You shall vote for Seymour and Blair, the ene- 
mies of your fundamental rights, or you shall not vote at all, or you 
shall be killed." That was the way Louisiana was made Democratic 
in 1868 ; and that is the way that I trust she will never be made 
so to vote again. Therefore I uphold and justify the Kii-Klux 
law. 

Fellow-citizens, the Kvi-Klux are no myth, althovxgh they shroud 
themselves in darkness. They are no flitting ghosts ; they are a 
baneful reality. They have paralyzed the Right of Suffi-age in many 
counties throughout the South, and have carried States that they 
ought not to have carried ; but they are not the only enemies to 
Hepublican ascendancy in the South. 

There is another influence equally pernicious with theii's, and a 
great deal more detrimental to the fame and character of the Re- 
publican party. I allude to what are known as the " thieving carpet- 
baggers." [Applause.] Fellow-citizens, do not mistake me. All t\\e 
Northern men in the South are not thieves. The larger part of them 
are honest and good men, some of whom stay there at the peril of 
their lives, because tliey believe it their duty. Next to the no- 
ble and true women who have gone down South to teach Black 
cliildren how to read — nobler there are not on the earth than these, 
whom a stupid, malignant, dilapidated aristocracy often sees fit to 
crowd into negro hovels to live, not allowing them to enter any 
White society because they are teaching negro children — next to 
these, who rank as the noblest women in the South, are the honest 



THE THIEVING CARPET-BAGGERS. 51 

and worthy Northern men, who, in the face of social proscrij^tion and 
general obloquy and scorn, stand firmly by the Repiiblican cause. 

There was a most urgent and special necessity for rigid economy 
in the reconstructed States of the South, even aside from their im- 
poverishment by war and the disruption of their industry by peace. 
For despotic government has this advantage over free, that its 
agencies are apt to be simj)le and cheap. The old Slave goverii- 
ments of the South were thoroughly aristocratic, and they were 
very rarely corrupt or prodigal. The planters paid most of the 
taxes ; they decided who should be legislators ; and they did not 
iibide jobbers. Legislative stealing was almost an unknown art 
among them. Then they had no public support of the poor ; each 
subsisted, after a fashion, his own iised-up slaves. The Poor 
Whites lived or died as they might ; and, except for the Whites or 
two or three gi'eat cities, there were no public schools : and tliis 
made government cheap and taxes light. 

With Emancipation, came a great change. There was an urgent 
demand for free schools, and the school-houses had to be built, to 
begin with ; for the public support of paupers, White and Black, 
and thei'e were no alms-houses ; and so with many public institu- 
tions. Just when the people were poorest, they were required to 
bear the heaviest public expense, though only accustomed to the 
lightest. Dissatisfaction and complaint were inevitable ; but every 
eflfort should have been made, every nerve strained, to mitigate them 
by vigorous economy. I regret to say that the reverse was the 
course pursued in some States by men who rode into power on the 
artilleiy wagons of the Union, under the flag of Emancipation. 

The public is often heedlessly unjust. Let a Government have 
10,000 ofiicial subordinates in power, of whom 9,900 are honest and 
true men who do their duty faithfully, while barely 100 are robbers 
and swindlers, the public will hear a great deal more about the 100 
robbers than about the 9,900 true men. The 100 stand out in the 
public eye — they are always doing something which exjioses them 
to the scornful gaze of the multitude — while the honest and true 
men pass along silent and unobserved, and nothing is said, very lit- 
tle is thought, of them. All attention is concentrated upon the 100, 
who are deftxulting, and stealing, and forging, and running away. 

Well, gentlemen, the thieving carpet-baggers are a mourn- 
ful fact ; they do exist there, and I have seen them. They are 
fellows who crawled down Soiith in the ti-ack of our armies, gen- 



52 THEY DAMAGE THE REPUBLICAN CAUSE. 

erally at a very safe distance in tlie rear ; some of them on sutlers' 
wagons ; some bearing cotton permits ; some of them looking sharj)ly 
to see what might turn Tip ; and they remain there. They at once 
ingratiated themselves with the Blacks, simple, credulous, ignorant 
men, very glad to welcome and to follow any Whites who professed 
to be the champions of th^ir rights. Some of them got elected Sena- 
tors, others Representatives, some Sheriffs, some Judges, and so on. 
And there they stand, right in the public eye, stealing and plunder- 
ing, many of them with both arms around negroes, and their hands 
in their rear pockets, seeing if they cannot pick a paltry dollar out 
of them ; and the public looks at them, does not regard the honest 
Northei-n men, but calls eveiy " carpet-bagger" a thief, which is not 
the truth by a good deal. But these fellows — many of them long- 
faced, and with eyes rolled up, are greatly concerned for the educa- 
tion of the Blacks, and for the salvation of their souls. [Great 
laughter.] " Let us pray," they say ; but they spell pray with an 
"e," and, thus spelled, they obey the apostolic injunction to "pray 
without ceasing." 

Fellow-citizens, the time has been, and still is, when it was 
perilous to be known as a Republican or an Abolitionist in the 
South ; but it never called the blush of shame to any man's cheek to 
be so called, until these thieving carpet-baggers went there — never ! 
[Applause.] They got into the Legislatures; they went to issuing 
State-bonds ; they pretended to tise them in aid of railroads and 
other improvements. But the improvements were not made, and 
the bonds stuck in the issuers' pockets. That is the pity of it. 

"Well," some say, "you have just such thieves at the North." 
Yes, we have — too many of them! [Applause.] But the South 
was already impoverished — was bankrupt — without money, without 
thrift, almost without food ; and these fellows went there robbing 
and swindling when there was very little to steal, and taking the 
last ten-cent shin-plaster off of dead men's eyes. They were recog- 
nized by the late aristocracy not merely as thieves but as enemies. 
Says Byi'on's Greek minstrel, 

" A tyrant — but our masters then 
Were still at least our countrymen. " 

Thus we regard the men who annually rob us at Albany, at 
Trenton, and at Harrisburg. They do not carry their plunder out 
of the State when they get any. These fellows do ! The South 



ABOUT LEE AND STONEWALL JACKSON. 53 

was not merely beaten in the late contest; she was profoundly 
astonished by the result. Her people have not fairly got over their 
amazement at their defeat ; and what they see of us are these thieves, 
who represent the North to their jaundiced vision, and, representing 
it, they disgrace it. They are the greatest obstacle to the triumph 
and permanent ascendancy of Republican principles at the South, 
and as such I denounce them. [Applaiise.] 

" Well, then, do you justify the Ku-Klux? " I am asked. Justify 
them in what? If they should choose tp catch a hundred or two 
of these thieves, place them tenderly astride. of rails, and bear them 
q.uietly and peaceably across the Ohio, I should of course condemn 
the act, as I condemn all violence; but the tears live in a very 
small onion that would water all my sorrow for them. [Laughter 
and applause.] But they do nothing like that; they don't go for 
the thieving carpet-baggers ; but they skulk around wretched 
cabins, and drag out inoffensive negroes, to lash and torture them, 
merely for standiii.g up for their rights as men. For this, I do exe- 
crate the Ku-Klux. I say they are a disgrace to Southern 
Chivalry ; and tliey would be drummed out of the South if there 
were any true Chivalry there. 

But it has been reported very widely that at Vicksburg, address- 
ing a mainly Southern audience, and trying to awaken in them 
something of the sentiment of nationality and patriotism which 
burns in a true American bosom, I said that I trusted the time 
would come when we of the Korth would honor Lee and Stonewall 
Jackson. I did not say that. What I did say was that I hoped 
the time wovild come when Americans North, as well as Americans 
South, would feel a just pride in the soldierly achievements and mili- 
tary character of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, just as I trusted the 
late Confederates would learn to feel a patriotic pride in the achieve- 
ments of Grant and Sherman, and Thomas and Sheridan. I said 
that, or something very like it. Possibly, you are not willing to go 
so far as that. Very well, there is no hurry. Take yovir time ; I 
can wait. Yes, I can wait. 

THE NEW DEPARTURE. 

But, gentlemen, my voice fails, yet I want to say a few words 
about the New Departure. When men ai-e in a bad fix, I reckon 
they had better depart from it ; and I fully justify those Demo- 
crats who have determined to depart from the foolish old busi- 



5*4 THE NEW DEPABTUBE. 

ness of running their heads against a stone wall. If I were there, 
I should depart ; and I think it well for them to do it ; and, since 
they do it, I am not inclined to criticise the manner too severely, 
nor to judge them too harshly. I have made a rule for some 
time never to conjure up a bad motive for a good action. They 
are where they ought not to be ; they propose to depart ; and I 
think they shoiild. 

Our Ohio friends do not take quite so charitable a view of the 
New Departure as I do. -They say there was a particularly rough 
character once, who was noted for violating the 8abbath, among 
other bad deeds. But finally he became converted, " got religion," 
and joined the church. All right. One day, a gentleman came 
along and asked a neighbor of his, " Do you see any great change 
in IjTokes since he joined the church ? " " O yes, very great ; he used 
to go out chopping Sunday mornings with his ax swung over his 
shoulder ; now he carries it under his coat." [Laughter.] Gentlemen, 
I am very glad that the Democratic party has taken off its shoulder 
the ax which it has wielded so many years in deadly hostility to the 
rights of the Colored race. I am glad even if it has put it under its 
coat ; but I hope it will think better of it and put it back into the 
wood-hovise, and meet the Blacks with open hands, saying, " We are 
going to treat each of you just as you shall deserve to be treated, 
no matter what is the color of your skin." I do believe they mean 
this — the most of them. I believe they mean hereafter to wear 
their Democracy somewhat more than skin-deep. At any rate, I 
shall urge and encourage them to do so. 

Fellow-citizens : I Avould not make too much of this ISTew Depar- 
ture. I do not imderstand these gentlemen even to profess any 
penitence for their past warfare against the Equal Rights of Men. 
I don't understand them even to promise that they will never renew 
that warfare. I only understand them as pledged to this extent : 
They admit that the three RepTiblican amendments to the Federal 
Constitution are now a part of that Constitution, and, while they 
shall remain there, they must be obeyed. That I understand to be 
the extent of the New Departure ; and I deem it worth a great deal. 
So long as they admit that these Amendments are in, I shall feel 
]iretty sure that they are not likely to get them out. I shall rest con- 
tent that the rights of all men, being citizens of the United States, 
are safe under the guaranties of the Federal Constitution. 

Twenty-five years ago, T stood at the polls of the XTXth Ward 



DEAD ISSUES SHOULD BE DKOPPED. 5^ 

of this city all one rainy, chill November day, peddling bal- 
lots for Eqnal Suffrage. I got many Whigs to take them, but not 
one Democrat. Again in 1860 — not eleven years ago — I again 
stood at my poll all day, and handed out the same kind of vote ; 
and I do not remember that a single Democrat took one. Some 
Republicans, even, would not take them ; but no Democrat would. 

I believe in Human Progress. I believe that men are rather 
wiser and better to-day than they were twelve years ago ; and here 
is proof of it. It is not two years since our Democratic State 
Legislature withdrew the consent given by its Republican predeces- 
' sors to the XVth Amendment, and, by a party vote, so far as New 
York could do it, they tried to defeat that amendment. Now, we 
have a New Departure. Was it not high time ? I think it was. 

Fellow-citizens : I am weary, weary, of this sterile strife concern- 
ing the fundamental j^rinciples of republican institutions. I am 
tired of trying to teach Democrats the A, B, C's of Democracy. I 
rejoice to know that they have taken a New Departure ; and I tell 
you that, when they have once taken it, it will be a great deal 
harder to get back to the old ground than to go on. Some one 
says, " Isn't it going to pvxt the Republicans ovit of power ? " I 
cannot tell. Immediately, I think not. Mr. Burke well says : 
" Confidence is a plant of slow growth ; " and I think it will take 
some time for the people to realize that the Democrats mean to up- 
hold Equal Rights — some time for their own folks to realize it — a 
great deal longer to make any Black man believe that they mean it. 

I don't anticipate any sudden change in the relative strength of 
parties, because of the New Departure, Ultimately, I think, it will 
strengthen the Democrats. "Then," one says, '•'■you will go out of 
power." Yes, we shall some time, no doubt. If it were to be my 
fate to go out this moment, and every year of my life thereafter to 
be in the minority, prostrate and powerless, I should still thank 
God, most humbly and heartily, that He allowed me to live in an 
age, and to be a part of the generation, that witnessed the downfall 
and extinction of American Slavery. [Prolonged a])plause.] 

Fellow-citizens : I trust the day is not distant wherein, putting 
behind us the things that concern the Past, we shall defer to that 
grand old inJTinction of the Bible : " Speak to the children of Israel 
that they go forward." I am weary of fighting over issues that 
ought to be dead — that logically were dead yeai's ago. When Slav- 
ery died, I thought that we ought speedily to have ended all that 



*66 THE NEW DEPARTURE, 

grew out of it by Universal Amnesty and Impartial Suffrage. [Ap- 
plause.] I think so still; and that if the Democratic party shall 
concede Impartial Suffrage, the Republican party will concede Uni- 
versal Amnesty,; if not, it will have a very short lease of power. 
So, then, friends, I summon you all, Republicans and Democrats, 
to prepare for the new issues and new struggles that visibly open 
before us. In the times not far distant, I trust we shall consider 
questions mainly of industrial policy — questions of national advance- 
ment — questions concerning the best means whereby our different 
parties may, through cooperation, or through rivalry, strive to pro- 
mote the prosperity, the happiness, and the true glory of the Ameri- 
can people. To that contest I invite you. For that contest I would 
prepare you. And so, trusting that the bloodshed in the jiast will 
be a sufficient atonement for the sins of the past, and that we are 
entering upon a grand New Departure, not for one party only, bvit 
for the whole country — a depaiture from strife to harmony, from 
devastation to construction, from famine and desolation to peace 
and plenty — I bid you, friends and fellow-citizens, an affectionate 
good-night.. [Prolonged cheers and applause.] 



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